MARRAKECH CITY GUIDE / WANDERING SMART

These tips will help you make the most of Marrakech

Marrakech is a bit of a blogger's haven, so unsurprisingly there are a lot of tricks floating around the internet about what to see, and where to visit. And for a traveller planning their best trip ever, it can be quite overwhelming.

When my boyfriend and I decided to plan our visit to Marrakech, we chose the city because it was a new place for both of us and was exciting and out of the box. 

For his birthday I got him this Lonely Planet travel guide (which I think I actually flicked through first and attacked with my post-it notes). This is a perfect segway into our first tip...

The Lonely Planet App

The Lonely Planet smartphone app is such a lifesaver. It's completely free (and none of those sneaky in-app purchases), and if I'm being honest it contains most, if not all of the information in the guide book I bought. While I really do prefer a book to an app, I can't deny the convenience of this amazing online guide.

Make sure you download the city map so that you can use it offline too! My roaming would have cost me £6.99 for 100mb of data so you can imagine that I wasn't about to turn that on if we got lost. Your location arrow will also turn depending on which way you're facing, which makes it extremely helpful for knowing which direction to turn first.

Locate the Koutoubia Mosque 

Being a large city, mosques are frequent and all as ornate and beautiful as the next. However, the Koutoubia Mosque is located just off the main square the Jeema el-Fna, and it's so tall that it can be seen from a lot of the city (particularly the central locations). We even saw the mosque from the Badi Palace, which is a fair walk away.

But why is the mosque important? This location will be known by every local in the city (so you can ask if you're stuck), it is also where the hotel shuttles typically drop off and collect guests from, as well as having an enormous taxi stand and multiple bus stops. 

Owing to its height, this also makes the perfect place to agree to meet should you and your travelling partner(s) become separated, as it is a good landmark to notice and find. Definitely agree on a meeting place - we learnt the hard way when we were there (and those pesky £6.99 international phone fees meant neither of our phones were online).

The mosque peers over the sand coloured rooftops as seen from this view at the Badi palace

Avoid blogger traps

On this trip, I made the mistake of searching blogger paradise (aka Instagram) for adorable little cafés and aesthetically pleasing places to visit. After watching several hours of youtube videos, I came up with Le Jardin and Nomad (coincidentally sister companies) and off we ventured in search of lunch. 

What a mistake it was not to just choose somewhere that looked popular or authentic, and most importantly close to what we wanted to visit. We walked about 25 minutes through hot and sweaty souks to find Le Jardin, and ended up finding the back entrance to start with anyway. The same happened with Nomad - it's right in the middle of one of the souks and just so hard to get to.

And we got there, and yes it has an amazing vibe and such cool decor, but was it really Moroccan? Not really. 

I can see how it would have been perfect for a blogger photo shoot, but I'm just not in that game - I'll take a nice photo but there just wasn't much to photograph at these places (besides yourself), and the food was mediocre and frankly overpriced. 

Obviously, they had their upsides, the places themselves were beautiful but both seemed very Westernised - so just be careful when you research where to visit as it might be very different to how you imagined.

A note on money

The Moroccan Dirham is a closed currency, which means that it can only be exchanged in the country of Morocco. While this is a bit of a nuisance in terms of things I could check off my to-do list before the trip, we exchanged the money at our hotel without too much fuss. That being said, they would not change it back for us - I believe the easiest place to do that is at the airport.

The exchange rate fluctuates but for our trip, it was just over 11 dirhams to £1. However, the city itself was not as cheap as I had expected (slash hoped!) and I found myself using the divide by ten rule quite a lot. 

Any price quoted I divided by ten in my head and considered if I was willing to pay that in English. This little trick definitely helped when the market vendors were enticing me - until I converted it in my head. 60 quid for a woven basket? No thank you.

I've left a load of other tips on the various posts I've written all about Marrakech, so definitely check them out here: Jardin Majorelle, near the Kasbah mosque, the Ben Youssef Madrasa and the Atlas Mountains. 

Be sure to have a look at the Wandering Smart tab for more information and other guides.