El Badi Palace

Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur commissioned the palace a few months after his accession in 1578, and the chronicler al-Ifrani puts the start of construction in December of that year, with fifteen years of work to 1593. The historian Gaston Deverdun read the evidence differently: a Portuguese plan of the kasbah drawn in 1585 already shows a finished palace, while records of al-Mansur buying marble run to 1602, the year before he died. The likeliest reading is that the shell went up fast in the early 1580s and the decoration never stopped.

The money had two sources and both are visible in the fabric. The Portuguese ransom paid after the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578 funded the start; the Saadian control of the sugar trade paid for the rest, and the Italian marble columns were bought by exchanging sugar for its equivalent weight in stone. Lime and plaster came up from Timbuktu.

Workers were brought in from across Morocco and from Europe in numbers large enough that a market grew up beside the building site to feed them.

The name is one of the ninety-nine names of God in Islam, usually translated as "the Incomparable", and it had a precedent: a pavilion in the caliph's palace at Cordoba carried it first. That is the whole ambition of the building in one word, and it is worth carrying into the courtyard, because what is left has to be read as the negative of what stood there.

What the Ministry says, and what it does not

The state's own listing is thin. Its ticket page for the monument gives the tariff, the 9h to 17h hours and the free-entry rule, and publishes no plan, no room list, no visit length, no closing day and no accessibility statement. That silence is not an oversight on our part: we read the Ministry's own page for the Palais Badii in Q3 2026 and there is nothing more on it to quote.

Open the state ticket page for the Palais Badii and the description under the tariff begins by saying the palace was founded in 1886 by Abi Imrane Moussa Ben Ahmed Ben Mbarek, grand vizier, and enlarged afterwards by his son Ba-Hmad. That is not this building. Those are the two viziers who built the Bahia, three hundred years later and a kilometre north-east.

The Ministry of Culture has printed the Bahia's history on El Badi's ticket page, and it was still there when we read both pages in Q3 2026.

The practical consequence is that a visitor who researches by copying the official text ends up expecting painted cedar ceilings and finds bare rammed earth. Told apart in one line: El Badi is Saadian, sixteenth century, ruined and roofless; the Bahia is Alaouite-era, nineteenth century, intact and full of ceilings. One was demolished on a sultan's orders, the other was emptied of its furniture on a sultan's orders, which is why both are bare and only one is a ruin.

They are also priced identically at $10.65 (100 MAD) a foreign adult, sit eight minutes apart on foot, and are sold from the same platform, so nothing in the ticketing helps you tell them apart either. Which of the two is worth your morning depends on whether you would rather see scale or craftsmanship, and that comparison is set out at length in our piece on choosing between the two palaces; the ceilings themselves are described on the Bahia page.

The courtyard and the pool. The rectangle measures 135 metres by 110, with a central basin 90.4 metres long and 21.7 wide. It is usually empty of water, which is the honest state of it: the point is the scale, and the four sunken gardens planted with orange trees sitting several metres below your feet. Four further basins, each roughly 30 by 20 metres, lie along the east and west sides.

It is a riad garden built at the size of a parade ground.

The Pavilion of the Fifty. The great western pavilion, al-Qubbat al-Khamsiniya, was the throne hall, named either for its area in cubits or for the fifty columns it once carried. The alcove in the back wall marks where the sultan sat, under an inscription cut in black marble against white. Stand in the alcove and look back down the pool: that is the view the building was designed around, and it is the one photograph worth taking here.

The undercroft and the bathhouse. Behind the southern pavilion are the partially excavated hammams, and beneath the courtyard runs the vaulted hydraulic system that fed the pools. These are the parts most visitors miss because the stairs down are unmarked. They are also the coolest place on the site at midday.

The ramparts and the storks. A stair leads up to a terrace on the walls with a view over the Kasbah quarter to the Atlas on a clear day. Storks nest on the parapets and on the ruined tower stumps, and they are permanent residents rather than a seasonal show. The last hour before closing is when the walls turn the colour the postcards claim.

The minbar room. The twelfth-century minbar that once stood in the Koutoubia mosque is displayed here in its own space, along with exhibition rooms opened in 2018. It is the oldest and finest object in the palace and it did not belong to it: like the Almoravid dome in the northern medina, it is a survivor of a building that no longer exists. The Ministry publishes no exhibition list, so ask at the window whether the room is open before you plan a visit around it.

The variable here is vertical, not horizontal. Walking the courtyard takes ten minutes and tells you the scale; the time goes on the two levels most people never reach, the undercroft below and the rampart terrace above. Whichever routing you take, the ruin is the one monument in the Kasbah that is better in the last hour than the first, because the walls need low light and the crowd has gone to dinner.

For comparison, the necropolis in the Kasbah rarely takes more than half an hour because the queue for the main chamber is the visit, and the vizier's palace runs 45 to 90 minutes. All three sit inside a fifteen-minute walk of each other, which is the shape the one-day plan uses, and three adult admissions at 100 MAD each come to $32.00 (300 MAD) before lunch.

The published statement is 9h to 17h, and that is all of it: no seasonal variation, no ticket-window closing time, no stated last entry and no weekly closing day. One operator listing for the monument states last entry at 16:30, which is plausible and is not a state figure, so treat it as the operator's claim and arrive before 16:00 rather than testing it.

Friday is the busiest day, and it is a tariff question

The Ministry grants free entry to Moroccan nationals every Friday and on the first day of national and religious holidays. A visitor pays the full 100 MAD on those days like any other, so a Friday afternoon costs you the same and buys you the fullest courtyard of the week. In a ruin this size that matters less than it does inside a palace, which is a real argument for putting El Badi rather than an interior into a Friday. The Friday and holiday openings page lists which monuments the rule covers.

The best hour, and the worst

Between 11:00 and 14:00 the courtyard is a treeless rectangle in full sun with no shade except the pavilion shells, and in summer that is a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience: the climate page has the July and August figures. The two good windows are the first hour after opening and the last hour before closing, and of the two the late slot wins, because the low sun on rammed earth is the whole reason photographs of this place look the way they do.

- The official ticket page describes the Bahia. The Ministry's own listing for the Palais Badii opens with a palace founded in 1886 by a grand vizier and enlarged by his son Ba-Hmad, which is the Bahia's history printed on the wrong monument [Ministry of Culture ticket page for the Palais Badii, read in Q3 2026]. - The walls were never meant to be seen. The rammed earth you photograph was the structural core, hidden under marble, zellij, carved stucco and gilding; the excavated zellij fragments include geometric patterns with twenty-pointed stars, more complex than anything Moroccan craftsmen had cut before [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Badi_Palace]. - The best object in it is a refugee. The twelfth-century minbar displayed here was made for the Koutoubia mosque, not for this palace, and it is four centuries older than the building that now houses it [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Badi_Palace]. - A Moroccan pays 30 MAD where you pay 100. The two-tier tariff is printed on the state platform along with free entry for Moroccan nationals every Friday, and almost no English-language page states it [Ministry of Culture ticket page for the Palais Badii]. - The ruin was an owl sanctuary and a grazing field. After the dismantling the enclosure was used for animals before it was a monument, which is why so little survives at ground level and why the excavated gardens sit metres below the modern surface [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Badi_Palace].

On foot from Jemaa el-Fna the walk is about twenty minutes: south-east out of the square down Riad Zitoun el-Jdid, past the Bahia, into Place des Ferblantiers, then through the arch of Bab Berrima and left along the palace wall. From the square itself it is one of the easier medina routes to hold in your head. From the Bahia it is eight minutes through the Mellah, and from the Saadian Tombs about seven.

By petit taxi, ask for Place des Ferblantiers and walk the last three minutes, because no vehicle reaches the gate. The meter is compulsory under a 1963 dahir restated by Interior Ministry circulars, and no Marrakech authority publishes the per-kilometre rates, so the running meter is your protection rather than a price list. Getting around sets out what is published and what is not.

The door. One visitor entrance, reached through Bab Berrima and along the outside of the enclosure wall, with the ticket window beside it. There is no group lane and no reserved-ticket lane, because there are no reserved tickets: a state e-ticket and a paper ticket join the same line. The queue here is minutes at worst, unlike the bottleneck at the tomb chamber up the road.