Yves Saint Laurent bought a run-down botanical garden and made it into a really nice place. In addition to an outdoor collection of plants a great berber museum lies in a corner of the park.
I liked the collection of cactus. To me a palm tree is a palm tree, and bamboo is bamboo, but the variation of cactus surprised me. So here is some pictures of cactus. To me the variation was surprising and nice.
The Bahia palace was the residence of the sultan and is very nicely restored. What made the most impression on me was the amount of details in the rooms. Since it is in accordance with Muslim rules, the motives was not any of living and breathing things. Here are some examples of the decorations.
I can’t help it when I see palaces, castles, churches mosques etc heavily decorated like this I think about the thousands of nameless and forgotten workers who did the work. They built and decorated everything beautifully, the sultan just used the palace.
Marrakesh has a big bazaar area inside the city wall and it was a confusing maze with no clear system to the lay-out. It was of course a huge selection of things to buy, some more tempting than others.
We saw several work shops with a primitive lathe.
With his right hand he is rotating the wood. His right foot and left hand he is guiding the chisel. He could only make small items, but they could be put together to larger items.
Marrakesh is called The Pink City and it was easy to understand why. Almost all buildings and walls were pink and the explanation is the old building method. They called it adobe style and the building materials were clay, sand and straw. The sand was red so the result was pink. Here is a part of the old city wall.
The holes is part of the method. The straws must have ventilation when they are drying. If not the wall would crack. The pigeons thought the holes were made for them!
Here is one of the gates in the old city wall.
I don’t think I saw a buildings higher than three stories even the new suburbs .
Here are three pictures taken from my hotel window.
The first is clearly sunset over a new housing development. The flowers grew up along the wall around the hotel, pink of course.
Steinar's travels 