Four days in Marrakech: a medina smaller than its reputation

Arrive, drop the bags, and do nothing ambitious. The first walk in the medina is disorienting for everybody, and the point of the afternoon is to fix two landmarks in your head: the minaret you can see from most of the city, and the square everything else radiates out from.

Start at the Koutoubia. The mosque itself is closed to non-Muslims, as all working mosques in Morocco are, so this is a look from the gardens rather than a visit, and it is still worth the twenty minutes. The minaret is twelfth century Almohad work, sibling to the Giralda in Seville and the Hassan Tower in Rabat, and the family resemblance is obvious once you are standing under it.

Then walk east into Djemaa El-Fna and stay until the light goes. The square changes character completely around sunset: the orange juice carts and snake charmers of the afternoon give way to rows of numbered food stalls, gas lamps, drum circles and storytellers, and it fills with as many Marrakchis as visitors. Eat there if you like, at a stall where locals are queueing, or on a terrace above the square if you would rather watch it than be in it.

The northern half of the medina is the working half: dyers, carpenters, slipper makers, coppersmiths, all still in the same lanes their trades have occupied for centuries. Three sights stand within two minutes of each other on one small square, and the souks run south from there back towards Djemaa El-Fna, which makes the whole day a loop you can walk without a map.

Go to the madrasa first and go early. It is a sixteenth century Quranic college built around a courtyard of white marble and a shallow reflecting pool, with carved cedar, stucco and zellij mosaic on every surface, and more than a hundred tiny student cells upstairs. Empty, it is one of the most beautiful rooms in Morocco. At eleven with three tour groups in it, it is a scrum.

The Marrakech Museum next door is worth an hour more for the building than the collection: it occupies the Dar Menebhi, a palace of the 1890s whose central court was later roofed and hung with an enormous brass chandelier. Then take the rest of the afternoon in the souks, which are less a market than a district, sorted roughly by trade, and where getting lost is more or less the intended experience.

The southern medina is where the sultans built. Three sites sit within a ten minute walk of each other in and around the Kasbah quarter, and together they tell a fairly blunt story about Moroccan dynasties: what one built, the next one took apart.

Bahia Palace is the gentlest of the three and the best one to start with. It went up at the end of the nineteenth century for a grand vizier, and it is all painted cedar ceilings, courtyards of orange trees and rooms arranged for a large household rather than for defence. There is almost no furniture, which makes the decoration easier to look at.

El Badi, ten minutes further, is the opposite: a vast rectangular ruin of red walls and sunken orange gardens, built by the Saadian sultan Ahmad al-Mansur in the late sixteenth century and stripped of its marble and gold within a century of his death to furnish a new capital at Meknes. Storks nest on the walls. Finish at the Saadian Tombs, which escaped that fate because they were sealed up and forgotten for two hundred years, and are consequently the one Saadian interior in Marrakech that survives intact.

Gueliz is a different city: 1910s and 1920s French planning, straight avenues, cafes with chairs facing the street. The two things everybody comes out here for stand next to each other about twenty minutes from the medina walls, and both are small enough to do properly before an afternoon flight.

The Majorelle garden was laid out from the 1920s by the painter Jacques Majorelle, who mixed the cobalt blue that carries his name and painted a villa and half the planters with it. Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge bought it in 1980 and restored it. It is a small garden, densely planted with cactus and bamboo, and it is very popular: book online and take the first slot of the day if you can, because it is genuinely unpleasant at noon.

The Yves Saint Laurent museum is a two minute walk away, in a building of terracotta brick laid in a pattern meant to read like woven fabric. Tickets are sold online only. Then a taxi to Menara, which is fifteen minutes away and the least stressful airport arrival in Morocco.