How Marrakech Became Marrakech

In January 1969, on a rooftop terrace in the Marrakech medina, Talitha Getty crouches in a kaftan and white boots while her husband stands hooded behind her and the Atlas mountains sit on the horizon. Patrick Lichfield takes the photograph. It runs in Vogue dated 15 January 1970, and the print now sits in the National Portrait Gallery in London^[1]. Within a decade, almost every reference to bohemian Marrakech routes back through that single frame.

The city in the photograph had been staged for half a century before the shutter clicked.

This is the second post in a series on how places become destinations. The first followed Bangkok, where a war and a state built the receiving infrastructure long before any travel writer named the place. Marrakech is the cleaner case: here you can date the machinery. The famous did not find Marrakech. They arrived after it had been built to be found.

The story we tell

The version that gets repeated has a small cast: a fashion designer, a doomed heiress, a photographer, and a garden. Each is real. Together they explain the marketing, not the city.

Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé first visited Marrakech in 1966, stayed at La Mamounia, and bought a house in the medina, Dar el-Hanch, almost at once^[2]. Saint Laurent later said the city taught him colour.

The Getty photograph did the rest. Shot in 1969 and published in Vogue in January 1970, it exported a look: the West's idea of Marrakech as a place where beautiful people went loose in kaftans against an ancient backdrop. The moment it captured was brief. Talitha Getty died in Rome in July 1971^[3]. The bohemian scene she fronted faded within a few years of the photograph.

What lasted was the consolidation that came after. In 1980, Saint Laurent and Bergé bought the Jardin Majorelle, the garden the French painter Jacques Majorelle had built and then left to decline, to stop a developer from putting flats on it^[4]. They restored it, opened a Berber museum inside the old studio in 2011, and in 2017 opened the Musée Yves Saint Laurent next door, on 19 October^[5]. The garden is now one of Morocco's most visited sites, drawing, by reported counts, more than seven hundred thousand visitors a year^[6]. A private aesthetic became a public monument with a paid gate.

Every piece of this is true. None of it explains the size of what Marrakech became.

What was already built

Before Saint Laurent, before the Gettys, before the first kaftan, the French protectorate had already decided what Marrakech would be for: a preserved spectacle that Europeans would come to look at. That decision is dated 1912.

France established its protectorate over Morocco on 30 March 1912, through the Treaty of Fez^[7]. The first Resident-General, Hubert Lyautey, governed by a planning doctrine that shaped almost every Moroccan city: leave the old medina intact and build a separate European town, the ville nouvelle, beside it. In Marrakech that new town was called Gueliz. It kept the medina whole as a thing to be visited while the modern functions moved next door. Preservation here was a framing device, not an act of care.

The hospitality followed the doctrine. La Mamounia opened in 1923, designed by Henri Prost and Antoine Marchisio, built to receive European visitors arriving on the new colonial railways^[8]. Winston Churchill, who returned to the city repeatedly and painted it, called Marrakech the loveliest spot in the whole world^[9]. The "discovery" credited to the 1960s had been engineered, marketed, and accommodated four decades earlier, by a colonial administration that understood the medina as an asset to be framed.

This is the layer that disappears when the story starts in 1966. The fashion crowd did not find an undiscovered city. They checked into a hotel that had been receiving Europeans for forty-three years, in a town that had been planned around their gaze.

Then the state scaled it

The modern surge runs on aviation policy, hotel-bed targets, and a king who treated tourism as industrial strategy. Taste had little to do with it. The numbers are the argument.

King Mohammed VI acceded in 1999 and made tourism a national priority. Vision 2010, the strategy his government launched at the turn of the decade, set a target of ten million arrivals by 2010, up from 4.4 million in 2001^[10]. The lever was access. Morocco signed an open-skies aviation agreement with the European Union in 2006, which let low-cost carriers fly directly into Marrakech-Menara, and the budget airlines arrived in volume^[11].

Vision 2020, presented in November 2010, raised the target to twenty million and reorganised the country into eight tourism territories, one of them named explicitly for Marrakech and the Atlantic coast^[12]. By 2019 Morocco recorded a record thirteen million arrivals and 78.6 billion dirhams in receipts^[13]. Marrakech alone took nearly three million of them^[14].

The concentration is the point. Two places, Marrakech and Agadir, absorbed most of the country's hotel demand.

A photograph does not concentrate fifty-seven percent of a nation's hotel-nights in two cities. Aviation deals, bed targets, and two decades of state marketing do.

Who paid for the look

The export of "Marrakech" had a price, and the medina families paid it. This is the counter-argument the romance leaves out.

The same aesthetic that Saint Laurent and the magazine spreads sold was, on the ground, a working economy of houses and craft. As foreign demand rose, foreigners bought into the medina itself. The geographers Anton Escher and Sandra Petermann, who studied the conversion of medina houses into riads, traced foreign ownership climbing from a few dozen homes in the early 1990s to around 150 by 1999 and nearly 500 by late 2000, with French buyers prominent among them^[15]. The pattern continued through the 2000s. Houses that had held Marrakchi families for generations became guesthouses and second homes owned from Paris and London. The look being sold to visitors was, in part, the displacement of the people who had made it.

Underneath the riads sits the craft economy that the romance consumes without naming: the zellij tile, the tadelakt plaster, the carpets and lanterns. Morocco's handicraft sector is worth roughly seven percent of the country's economic output and employs more than 2.6 million people^[16]. The medina that photographs so well is a workplace. The aesthetic Saint Laurent learned colour from was made by hands that the credit never reaches.

The medina of Marrakech has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985^[17]. The same decade that named the medina worth protecting was the decade that began selling it off.

What this rhymes with

Marrakech and Bangkok land the same point through different ignitions. The set is always built before the stars arrive. The credit always goes to the stars.

Bangkok's receiving infrastructure was built by a war and a developmental state, and the credit went to backpackers and a television chef. Marrakech's was built by a colonial planning doctrine and an industrial-scale tourism strategy, and the credit went to a fashion designer and a photograph. The ignitions differ. The machinery is the same, and it is always older than the story.

There is a reason this matters now, beyond getting the history right. The layer that recommends places is becoming automated. The travel platforms, and the search forms behind them, were built around a narrow idea of who travels and why. The artificial-intelligence agents arriving on top of them are training on the same stories the travel press has told for fifty years. An agent asked about Marrakech will surface the kaftan and the riad and the rooftop, because that is what the corpus says Marrakech is. It will not surface the 1912 planning decision, the bed targets, or the families priced out of the medina, because almost nobody wrote those down where a model could read them.

The city was a stage set before it was a destination. Someone has always owned the stage, and it has rarely been the people in the photographs.