Marrakech

Medina

6 galleries · 15 museums · 0 places

About this district

The Medina is the walled old city of Marrakech, the labyrinth of alleys converging on Jemaa el-Fna beneath the Koutoubia minaret. It is the city's dense historic heart, and its relationship with art runs two ways at once: the living craft culture of the souks — metalwork, textiles, zellige, leather — and a set of galleries and museums tucked behind plain riad walls that give no hint of what's inside. This is the oldest, busiest, most sensory Marrakech, and the art here is woven into the fabric of the place rather than set apart from it. You navigate on foot. The scale is intimate and endless at once.

Galleries

Museums

Places

No published places in this district yet.

Petra Beyond Indiana Jones — blog article
Editorial

Petra Beyond Indiana Jones

The 1989 film gave Petra a façade and invented everything behind it. The real story is in the water systems, the aniconic sculpture, the painter who framed your photograph in 1839 and the families moved out so the world could come in.

Spielberg's crew filmed the Treasury's façade in Jordan, then built the Grail chamber on a soundstage in Hertfordshire — because the real interior of Al-Khazneh is a plain, undecorated room. It's a perfect miniature of how Petra is understood: one wall, photographed a million times a year, standing in for a city that is mostly still unexcavated.