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Marrakech is famed for its Souq. At home we have markets, but they don’t compare to this knotted tangle of streets, lined by tiny businesses that will have been trading in its shady corners since the Normans invaded Britain. It’s many travellers’ sole reason for coming to Marrakech.

After an early briefing we split into groups and headed into the Medina, the old city still ringed by an unbroken 16km of thick red walls. Everything in Marrakech is red. Either because it’s so old it was built of the local red mud, or because it’s been painted that way to match the rest of the city.

The wide rose-trimmed roads disappeared, to be replaced by tighter, narrower paths that opened up onto squares. We passed the great mosque, the oldest and tallest building in the city, and pulled up at the end of an alley lined by small shops. Idle men sat in the doorways, sheltering from the heat, and bony cats slinked along in the shadows, calling out for food.

Azim, our guide, explained that he would be taking us through the Souq, and to be careful with our cameras; not because they might be stolen - this is a very safe city, and it felt it - but because we could offend people if they popped up in our pictures. Try to avoid taking pictures of women, he said. And the old.

So we set out down a narrow alley barely wide enough for three to walk side by side, jumping out of the way of the motorbikes that cut through the tide of pedestrians. A small truck chanced its luck and pushed down behind them, forcing us all to squeeze into nooks in the wall or slip through an opening onto a small construction site where dusty workers were shovelling red earth into wooden carts strapped to the backs of a small troop of donkeys.

Watch out for bikes in the Souq

The deeper we got into the Souq, the more striking it became. It’s a boggling collection of tiny businesses, clustered together in groups. A whole alley of metalworkers; next door, a row of lantern makers, slaving over furnaces with primitive instruments in the scorching heat of the day. Turn a corner and it’s hand-made shoes as far as you can see. Around another, chickens by the thousand, unbroken strings of fruit and nut stalls, chameleons and terrapins, countless herbalists, and woodworkers beyond number.

We stopped by one of these woodworkers’ shops and he carved amulets for each of us with his feet, using his hands to run a bow back and forth to spin his manual spindle. No electrical tools here; instead he made boxes and kebab skewers the same way they would have done 500 years ago.

Metalworkers’ shops in the Souq

It was impossible to get a handle on how large the Souq might be, and I suspect it may be a little smaller than it felt, but we walked around it for a good two hours and I didn’t spot the same thing twice. When we eventually stepped out of its shady lanes, slashed by strips of sun that cut their way through the slatted wood roofs, we were in the enormous central square that at night is turned into a food market of epic proportions. Here, in the full heat of midday, traders laid out their wares on rugs and sat by them without any shade.

A street dentist proudly displayed his collection of ugly tools for pulling teeth, without either anaesthetic or a dental chair. Snake charmers played raspy tunes to their mesmerised cobras, while others kept monkeys on the ends of strings. One stall, beside a vendor of hairy animal parts, had a small train track set out on the ground. It was aqua blue, like the Thomas the Tank Engine sets you can get back home. Here, though, rather than Thomas, Henry and George, there was Osama bin Laden on a horse, pursued by an American in a tank that could never quite catch up with him.

We cut across the square, past caged chinchillas and meat-heavy food stalls that only hinted at what would become of the square at night. Azim (who has taken to calling us Friends of Mohammed as it’s easier than remembering our names) took us back there after sundown, and it was ever more frenetic.

We approached from the mosque, past the line of stinking horses queued up to wait for passengers, and could see the light of a thousand stalls set up on the square. Their bare electric bulbs burned yellow in the smoke and steam that hung in the air, and it seemed that the whole of Marrakech had come out to eat. Azim assured us that it was like this every night, and not a show for tourists. It was, he reminded us, a Unesco World Heritage Site, like the hilltop view down the Danube of Buda and Pest, or Porto’s Ribera.

As we moved closer, figures appeared from the smoke: two men boxing for small coins, thrown to them by the encircling crowd; men carrying snakes; a small girl tugging on my t-shirt so that I might buy the two pocket packs of tissues she held up. Beyond a ring of bottles the passers-by were trying to hook with looped string in the hope of winning a prize were the food stalls. Here sat cows’ severed heads, ready to be sliced and fired and served up to eat; enormous piles of 100 eggs or more, hard boiled and ready to peel; a ton of oranges for juicing; nuts to be cracked; piles and piles of snails to boil. A doctor sat at a battered table with three books, barely holding themselves together, as if to prove that if he didn’t know what ailed you, at least he knew where to look it up.

The ultimate street food: the night market in Marrakech

Nuts and fruit on sale in the main square

It was all accompanied by the excited chatter of locals out for food, the crackle of hot fat, and the bells of a man who leapt around among the crowd, ringing every time he spotted you taking a picture, to warn the stall holders that they were the target of your lens.

We worked our way through the square and out into the alleys behind it and into a riyad for dinner. Riyads are old houses, with all the rooms coming off a central courtyard that is open to the sky to keep it cool. You can afford to do that in a country with only 25 days rain every year. We had drinks on the roof, looking out over the city, and then descended two floors to eat curry and drink sickly sweet mint tea as belly dancers and local singers kept us entertained.

A noisy, exciting day.

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africa, marrakech, morocco

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Journal, Travel, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.