Home UpMarrakech Environs

Phonetically, the name is better spelled Marrakesh. More slippery, the city was known to the English speaking world of the 19th century not as Marrakesh (or as Maraksh, which approximates the Arabic name still more closely) but as Morocco, from which the entire country got its English name. In Arabic, the country has always been Maghrib al Aqsa, "the farthest west." Now that we're completely confused, we can proceed with proper humility.

The city occupies a small part of the Houaz, a plain rimming the northern side of the High Atlas, shown here with January snows.

The city's water supply has famously been derived, at least in part, from underground channels, the tunnels known by various names (*qanat, karez, foggara, *etc.), across the dry zone of North Africa and Asia. Here they are called khettara. Those of the Houaz have apparently been abandoned since the 1970s, and there are reports that those serving Marrakech itself were in disrepair long before then, but perfectly ordinary surface ditches survive.

Fields are protected by thorns at least as effective as barbed wire.

The premier crop: olives.

You aren't going to snitch any of them.

Live-thorn (acacia?) fencing.

Not much chance of wandering off the road.

A Berber village below the snows.

Higher in the mountains.

Higher still. For several days after this picture was taken, the highway to the other side was closed.

Back down on the Houaz, isolated villas hint at the presence of the city.

Walling them is the norm.

Gardeners train plants to hug the inside of those walls by tying them up with strings held taut by rocks on the other side.

Despite the love of gardens, roadside trees are pruned barbarously.

Some of the wood winds up as firewood trucked to the old city, here next to the kasba mosque.