A medina among medinas

Marrakesh, known as the ‘Red City’, is the largest of the thirty-one historic living towns (medinas) in Morocco with an intramural surface of 640 ha (including the Aguedal and Ménara gardens), extensive ramparts and their majestic gates, numerous monuments and residences, preserved gardens, long-inhabited markets and a vibrant craft industry. The cultural space of Jamaâ El Fna square mediates between the Medina and the external world. As an attractive interface and place of integration of populations originating from diverse backgrounds, it adds heritage value to the special role played by the Medina and the whole of this urban area in Morocco (Bigio, 2010). The population of the Medina accounts for 17.17 per cent of that of the urban area of Marrakesh, i.e. 182,637 of 1,063,415 inhabitants, according to the 2004 census, and it represents a quarter of the population of the old cities of Morocco, i.e. 182,637 of 737,945 inhabitants (Taamouti et al., 2008).

Marrakesh was born out of strategic necessity. It was founded by the Almoravid dynasty in AD 1070–1071 on what seems to have been a space of commercial exchanges between mountain and plains communities. It was quasi-sacred territory, Amur, in which violence was banished, under the protection of a Berber divinity, Akuch. The sacred space of Akuch, or more precisely Amur Akuch, became Marrakesh, thus giving its name to the early urban settlement (Toufiq, 1988; Skounti, 2004).