Morocco: Marrakech – Jardin Majorelle

🌵 From the Medina to Majorelle: An Improbable Walk on the Wrong Side of Marrakech

After we had finished our tour of the Medina — which, depending on your constitution, is either the most thrilling or most bewildering place on earth — we decided to make our way to the Jardin Majorelle. It was roughly four kilometres from Jemaa el-Fna, the great central square that acts as Marrakech’s beating, chaotic, occasionally goat-scented heart.

Now, four kilometres in a city you know, on a cool English morning, after a decent night’s sleep and a proper breakfast, is nothing. Four kilometres in Marrakech, after several hours of navigating the Medina, in the North African heat, is a proposition that deserves a little more consideration than we gave it. We decided to walk. This seemed entirely reasonable at the time. We would, as they say, revisit that decision later.

The sensible option, of course, would have been to find a petit taxi — the cheerful, battered little Fiat and Dacia saloons that swarm through Marrakech’s streets like industrious beetles. They are cheap, plentiful, and almost always available, and the drivers know the city better than they know their own families. But no. We walked. Because apparently we are the sort of people who do that.

The saving grace — and it was a genuine one — was Google Maps, which turned out to be unexpectedly reliable in threading us through the outer lanes of the Medina. I say unexpectedly because I had rather assumed that a city whose street layout was designed sometime around the eleventh century, apparently by someone who had given up on the concept of right angles entirely, would defeat modern satellite navigation without breaking a sweat. But it managed. We followed the little blue dot, turned where it told us to turn, and emerged, eventually, blinking into the broader streets of the Guéliz district — Marrakech’s French-built new town — with our dignity more or less intact.

The walk itself was worth doing, even if the legs would register a formal complaint later. The streets leading away from the Medina offered a rather more domestic version of Marrakech: tiny shops selling electrical components, rolls of cable, plastic buckets in improbable colours, mobile phone cases, hardware of every description, and the sort of miscellaneous items that end up in a basket outside a shop with no clear logic or organising principle. Families were going about their shopping in the unhurried way that suggests they are not, in fact, rushing to reach a garden four kilometres away in the midday heat. And the cats — Marrakech has cats the way England has pigeons, which is to say everywhere and in great quantity — were arranged at intervals in patches of sunlight with the languid, self-satisfied air of creatures who have absolutely nowhere to be.

🎨 Jacques Majorelle and the Garden He Built

The Jardin Majorelle turned out to be one of those places that genuinely surprises you, which is an achievement in itself given that you have almost certainly seen several hundred photographs of it before you arrive.

The story begins in the nineteen-twenties, when a French artist named Jacques Majorelle came to Marrakech and fell rather thoroughly in love with the place. Majorelle was born in Nancy in 1886, the son of Louis Majorelle, who was one of the leading furniture designers of the Art Nouveau movement — a man whose cabinets and tables fetch extraordinary sums at auction today. Jacques did not go into furniture. He trained as a painter in Paris, was drawn to the Mediterranean light, and eventually made his way to Morocco, which had become a French Protectorate in 1912 and was attracting a steady stream of European artists, writers, and adventurers who found that the light and the colour and the general foreignness of it all made excellent material.

Majorelle settled in Marrakech, and in the early nineteen-twenties he acquired a plot of land on the western edge of the Medina — then a fairly unremarkable piece of ground — and set about turning it into something extraordinary. Over the following four decades, he designed and built a Moorish-influenced studio, filled the surrounding grounds with plants gathered from across the world, and created a botanical garden that was as much a work of art as anything he put on canvas.

He brought in palms from the Americas, cacti from Mexico and the American Southwest, bamboo from Asia, bougainvillaea from South America, and water plants from wherever he could find them. He installed fountains and pools and shaded walkways. He built pergolas and planted jasmine. By the time he had finished, the garden contained several hundred plant species from five continents, which, for a single person working in the nineteen-twenties and thirties without the benefit of the internet or a garden centre on every retail park, was a fairly impressive effort.

And then there was the colour.

🔵 The Blue

At some point in the nineteen-thirties, Majorelle decided to paint his studio and the various garden walls and pots and structures in a particular shade of cobalt blue — a blue of such intensity and saturation that it looks, when you first encounter it in person, slightly wrong. Not wrong in a bad way. Wrong in the way that a particularly vivid dream is wrong: technically impossible, and yet undeniably there.

The shade became so associated with Majorelle and his garden that it eventually acquired an official name: Majorelle Blue. It has its own identity now, completely separate from any standard paint chart. Standing in front of it on a bright Moroccan morning, with the green of the palms above and the terracotta of the surrounding city somewhere beyond the walls, it makes a visual impact that is frankly difficult to describe without resorting to the sort of language I was specifically asked not to use. It is just a very striking blue. Extraordinarily so.

Majorelle lived and worked in his garden until 1962, when he was involved in a serious road accident that required medical treatment in France. He died in Paris that same year, aged seventy-five, having spent the better part of four decades in his Moroccan paradise. After his death, the garden fell into neglect. The plants were not properly maintained, the buildings deteriorated, and there was serious talk of demolishing the entire site to build a hotel — which would have been, in the great tradition of development decisions, an act of spectacular cultural stupidity.

👗 Enter Yves Saint Laurent

Fortunately, in 1980, two men arrived who had both the money and the inclination to save it.

Yves Saint Laurent needs little introduction, though he shall have one anyway. Born in Oran, Algeria, in 1936, he was a child prodigy of fashion who began designing at an age when most people are still working out how to tie their shoelaces. He joined the house of Christian Dior at the age of seventeen, became its head designer at twenty-one following Dior’s sudden death, and went on to found his own fashion house in 1962 — the same year, as it happens, that Majorelle died.

Saint Laurent had a deep and lasting connection with Morocco. He first visited Marrakech in 1966 with his partner and business collaborator Pierre Bergé, and the city captivated him immediately. He returned repeatedly throughout his life, keeping a house in the Medina, and found in the colours and textures and light of Morocco a constant source of creative inspiration. Moroccan influences ran through his work in ways both obvious and subtle: the rich colours, the djellabas, the embroidery, the gold.

When Saint Laurent and Bergé learned that the Jardin Majorelle was under threat, they purchased it and undertook a complete and careful restoration. They repaired the buildings, restored the planting, maintained the pools and fountains, and ensured that Majorelle Blue remained exactly as Majorelle had intended it. They opened the garden to the public and it became, over the following decades, one of the most visited sites in Morocco.

Saint Laurent remained attached to the garden for the rest of his life. Following his death in Paris in June 2008, his ashes were scattered among the rose garden within the grounds — a quiet and rather moving conclusion to a connection that had lasted more than forty years. A small memorial stone marks the spot. Pierre Bergé, who continued to maintain and develop the site after Saint Laurent’s death, also had his ashes scattered there following his own death in 2017.

Within the garden complex, a museum now houses a collection of Berber cultural artefacts and exhibits — carpets, jewellery, clothing, tools, and objects that document the life and traditions of the indigenous Amazigh people of North Africa. A separate space is dedicated to commemorating Saint Laurent’s connection with Morocco, featuring photographs, garments, and personal objects. It is, all things considered, a rather more interesting combination of exhibits than you might expect from a garden.

🌿 What the Garden Is Actually Like

Now, I appreciate that I have spent several paragraphs on the history and rather less on what it is actually like to walk around the place, so here is an attempt to correct that.

The garden is not enormous. You are not going to need hiking boots or a packed lunch. It covers around a hectare, which is about the size of a reasonably large English country garden, and the paths are shaded and relatively easy to navigate. What it lacks in scale it more than compensates for in density and atmosphere.

The planting is genuinely extraordinary. Towering Mexican tree cacti — some of them several metres high, with the sort of architectural confidence that suggests they have absolutely no interest in your opinion — stand alongside dense bamboo groves that sway in the slightest breeze and make a sound like a very gentle, very polite round of applause. Palms of various species rise above the canopy. Bougainvillaea tumbles over walls in shades of magenta and orange. Ground-level planting is lush and varied, with succulents, ferns, and things I could not identify but which clearly knew what they were doing.

The pools are rectangular and calm, drifting with water lilies in pink and white, with koi carp moving slowly beneath the surface like large, decorative thoughts. Fountains trickle — not dramatically, not in a theme-park way, just enough to add sound to the air and keep the atmosphere cool. Birds made themselves heard throughout, though they were largely invisible in the foliage, which is probably how they prefer it.

And over all of it, the blue. The studio building, the garden walls, the pots and planters and architectural details — all that extraordinary cobalt, intensified by the Moroccan light and set against the green of the planting in a combination that should not, by any logical reckoning, work as well as it does.

After the density and noise and relentless stimulation of the Medina — which is marvellous, genuinely marvellous, but also quite a lot — the garden was genuinely restorative. It is a place that rewards slow movement and a willingness to simply stand still for a bit, which is not something I am naturally inclined towards, but which the garden more or less compelled.

It was, in short, worth the four kilometres. Though my feet were registering a rather different view.

💭 Reflections

The Jardin Majorelle turned out to be one of the best things we did in Marrakech, which I say as someone who had expected to find it pleasant but slightly overrated. It was neither. It was genuinely beautiful and unexpectedly moving — a place with several layers of history and human effort behind it, all of which you can feel without anyone having to explain it to you.

Majorelle spent four decades building something that nearly got bulldozed into a hotel, and Saint Laurent spent another three decades making sure it survived. That is a fair amount of human effort and devotion for one hectare of garden in the middle of a Moroccan city, and the result justifies all of it.

The walk was good too, even if we were perhaps not the most practical people to have attempted it. The streets between the Medina and the garden showed us a side of Marrakech that the main tourist route does not — ordinary, domestic, getting on with things. That has its own value.

If I were doing it again, I would probably take a taxi there and walk back. But I probably would not, because I am apparently the sort of person who always thinks the walk is a good idea until the last quarter mile, and by then the damage is done.

Go. Take your time. And bring comfortable shoes.