Marrakesh
UNESCO's only protected marketplace has operated for a thousand years in Marrakesh's Jemaa el-Fnaa—Morocco's tourism capital converts medieval riad courtyards into boutique hotels while the 2023 earthquake exposed the fragility of heritage-dependent economics.
Jemaa el-Fnaa is the only UNESCO-protected marketplace in the world, and it has operated as an open-air entertainment economy for over a thousand years. Every evening, Marrakesh's central square transforms into a dense ecology of food stalls, musicians, storytellers, snake charmers, and henna artists—a self-organizing commercial ecosystem that UNESCO designated a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001.
Marrakesh was founded around 1070 by the Almoravid dynasty as a military base for Berber expansion across North Africa and into Spain. The city's red sandstone walls—which give it the name 'Red City'—enclosed one of the medieval Islamic world's most important trading posts, connecting sub-Saharan gold and salt routes to Mediterranean markets. Three successive dynasties (Almoravid, Almohad, Saadian) used Marrakesh as their capital, and each left architectural monuments: the Koutoubia Mosque, the Saadian Tombs, and the elaborate riad courtyard houses that now anchor the city's tourism economy.
Modern Marrakesh has roughly 840,000 residents and receives over three million international tourists annually—more than any other Moroccan city. The riad renovation industry transformed abandoned courtyard houses in the medina into boutique hotels, creating a heritage tourism model that cities from Fez to Cartagena have attempted to replicate. The 2023 Al Haouz earthquake (magnitude 6.8), centered 70 kilometers southwest, damaged hundreds of historic structures and killed nearly 3,000 people in surrounding areas.
Marrakesh operates as a tourism monoculture with agricultural hinterland. The surrounding Haouz Plain produces olives, citrus, and dates. But the city's economic center of gravity is hospitality: hotels, restaurants, guided tours, artisan workshops, and the airport that connects Morocco to European budget airlines. The earthquake exposed the risk of building an economy on structures that seismic activity can destroy—a vulnerability Marrakesh shares with other heritage-dependent cities in active geological zones.