Koutoubia Mosque

Five times a day, one voice rises above the Djemaa din in the adhan ( call to prayer): that’s the muezzin calling the faithful from atop the Koutoubia Mosque minaret. After a few days in Marrakesh, even non-Muslim visitors unconsciously respond to the adhan throughout the day: a flutter of eyelashes at the dawn call, a surge of sudden purpose with the afternoon call, a calming breath when the evening call arises.

Minaret

The Koutoubia serves a spiritual purpose, but its minaret is also a point of reference for international architecture. The 12th-century 70m-high minaret is the prototype for Seville’s La Giralda and Rabat’s Le Tour Hassan, and it’s a monumental cheat sheet of Moorish ornament: scalloped keystone arches, jagged merlons (crenellations), and mathematically pleasing proportions. The minaret was sheathed in Marrakshi pink plaster, but experts opted to preserve its exposed stone in its 1990s restoration.

Mosque & Gardens

The mosque is off-limits to non-Muslims, but the recently refurbished gardens are fair game. Excavations confirm a longstanding Marrakshi legend: the original mosque built by lax Almoravid architects wasn’t properly aligned with Mecca, so the pious Almohads levelled it to build a realigned one. When the present mosque and its minaret were finished by Almohad Sultan Yacoub el-Mansour in the 12th century, 100 booksellers were clustered around its base – hence the name, from kutubiyyin, or booksellers.