Top riad in Marrakech

Riad Honey

The South Medina is a relatively undiscovered, undeveloped neighbourhood, but the pretty red passageway planted with roses that hides this cute little guesthouse suggests it could be on the up. Opened in 2007, the intimate, red tadelakt courtyard, with its black-tiled paddling pool, makes for a dramatic entrance. You’ll find the eight rooms rather more sedate. The best has a four-poster bed, with crisp, embroidered linen, creamy walls and cool, tiled bathrooms. The shady, lushly planted roof terrace is a fantastic spot for breakfast. Mainly, though, this is a great jumping-off point if you’re heading for the Sahara, as the road south is practically on the doorstep.
• Doubles from €100 B&B, +212 524 38 69 81, riad-honey.com

Top riad in Marrakech

Riad Rbaa Laroub

This riad is named after a stopped clock (r’baa laroub means quarter to four) that French owner Jean-Noël Schoeffer gave pride of place to in the main courtyard 15 years ago, and hasn’t moved since. The polished terracotta-tiled space is filled with antiques and curios, and a gaggle of return guests who’ve been passing through for years. More home than hotel, it has seven individually decorated rooms, enriched with painted wood ceilings, black and yellow floor tiles, and antique embroidered bed linen, while the jungle-like roof terrace is a haven of secret corners to hide away in. On cold days breakfast is served in the dining room, but most guests gather around the kitchen table instead.
• Doubles from €75 B&B, +212 524 390 716, darrbaalaroub.com

Top riad in Marrakech

Riad Al Jazira

Not many medina hotels are big enough to have a courtyard swimming pool but Al Jazira is one of them. Enclosed within cool, plaster columns, the pool forms the focal point of this sprawling, 17th-century property, which consists of three houses knocked into one, with an unusually minimalist decor. Simple white furnishings, potted paddle-leaf cacti and the odd contemporary artwork allow the architecture to speak for itself. The owner, Abdellatif Aït Ben Abdallah, now has several hotels under his belt, as well as the iconic Dar Cherifa literary café and Dar Zellij, one of the best restaurants in town for traditional Moroccan fine dining.
• Doubles from €87 B&B, +212 524 426 463, riad-aljazira.com

Top riad in Marrakech

Riad Tizwa

Tizwa is the kind of place that makes you go “ahh …” the minute you swoosh through the door. Original dove-grey and white tiles cover wraparound balconies draped with white-linen curtains, and scented jasmine cascades down to the courtyard. It’s a great place to curl up on a sofa and do nothing, yet just minutes from the main souks and a short cab ride into the Ville Nouvelle. The five rooms are spacious and comfortable, with some lavish details, such as the ornately carved plaster ceilings in the courtyard room, but it’s the thoughtful touches that make the place: who doesn’t love finding flasks of piping-hot tea and coffee outside their room when they wake up in the morning?
• Doubles from €95 B&B, 07973 115 471, riadtizwa.com

Top riad in Marrakech

Dar Hanane

Near the Ben Youssef madrasa – the city’s most important Islamic school – this cute, six-room riad is one of the oldest houses in the medina, though you’d never know it. It’s arranged around a central courtyard shaded by bitter-orange trees (for making marmalade). You can sip tea by the fire in the first-floor salon, feast on traditional tagines and couscous in the red dining room, and laze around down in the bhou – a built-in sofa beneath the inglenook-style beams. The in-house chefs, Hanane and Cherifa, host cooking classes (€40pp). Rooms have colourful details – candy-striped easy chairs in the Garden room and turquoise pom-pom blankets in the Berber room – and the rooftop views of the Atlas mountains are sensational. 

The foodie traveller in … Fez, Morocco

Morocco’s third city will play host this winter to a talented chef/sommelier duo from the Paris Popup, who will add their own twist to traditional cuisine and ingredients

If you’re in Fez in the next three months, you’ll be in for a tasty treat if you can score a reservation at Restaurant Numero 7, in the heart of the medina. That’s because this restaurant also functions as a place where international chefs can take a culinary sabbatical and discover Moroccan gastronomy. The invited chefs spend time browsing markets and local produce before reinterpreting Moroccan dishes for diners at the restaurant, in a traditional medina house with contemporary decor.

From next weekend, foodie duo Harry Cummins and Laura Vidal of The Paris Popup will be at the helm. Cummins, a British-born chef, and Vidal, who’s from Montreal and is a well-known sommelier in Paris, met while working at Gregory Marchand’s Paris restaurant, Frenchies. With a mutual love for travel and culinary discovery, they founded Paris Popup last year and have since left their mark on almost every continent, sourcing local products, speaking with producers and putting their new-found knowledge to use in pop-up kitchens.

In Kyoto they found a variety of green tea, hojicha, that tastes like red Burgundy, and paired it with sake soaked in sherry casks and seafood from the local markets.

So what will be on the table in Fez? It’s all about surprise and market finds, but Vidal hopes to experiment with Moroccan herbs and spices to make new vermouths, while Cummins’s talents could reveal a new slant on the tagine or thepastilla cinnamon-coated meat pie – and all will be washed down with the best Moroccan wines.

A Moroccan model for change

Rory MacLean visits a hotel in the High Atlas mountains to see how responsible tourism is bringing benefits to the local community

Travellers transform places, for better and for worse. Tourism has ruined miles of Britain and Spain's southern coasts, as well as countless fishing village between Paphos and Ko Samui. At the same time it has revived the fortunes of St. Moritz, Cannes, the Bahamas and, over the last thirty years, many a crumbling Tuscan and Provencal hamlet. We come, we see, we make a place our own.

Although long on the jet-set's radar, Morocco is a latecomer to large-scale tourism. Since the 19th century independent souls have been drawn to north Africa. Flaubert, Matisse and George Orwell were followed in the Sixties by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were photographed by Cecil Beaton beside the pool at the Hotel Es Saadi in Marrakech. Yves Saint Laurent, the Rothschilds and a host of celebs busied themselves house hunting in the Medina. The bohemians, the Beats and the designers - among them Bill Willis, Charles Boccara and Meryanne Loum-Martin - popularised the country, propelling it into our collective conscious and sowing the seeds for its transformation.

Hence parts of old, red Marrakech are today unrecognisable. The Palmeraie has been gentrified. Among its groves at Jnane Tamsna, the original boho-chic Moroccan villa hotel, guests (including of late David Bowie and Brad Pitt) dine on inspiring French, Moroccan and Senegalese dishes. At Vanessa Branson's trendyRiad El Fenn 24 sumptuous rooms are arranged around three mature courtyards, two heated swimming pools and a home cinema. Its rooftop terraces boast one of the finest views of the Medina, towards the Koutoubia mosque and the snow-capped Atlas mountains. At Ministero del Gusto a former Italian Vogue editor and her partner sell glamour and retro furniture from their eclectic art-gallery-cum-design consultancy. Behind myriad Old City doors Morocco's famed artisans are now resurrecting decrepit riads for Paris couturiers and London book editors.

The city continues to seduce visitors with its sunshine, its effortless flair, its palm groves rising from the desert and swallows swooping through the dusk above broad Djemaa el Fna square. In turn, Marrakchis let events unfurl as fate decrees, enjoying the new opportunities, acknowledging foreigners' role in the revitalisation of traditional crafts.

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This equitable exchange, so rare in modern tourism, is magnificently illustrated 40 miles out of town at theKasbah du Toubkal.

Beyond Asni, dusty cumin-coloured hills rise above the Mizane Valley. Berbers in hooded, Hobbit-like burnouses work on narrow terraces above the racing, glacial river. Mule paths cut back and forth across the steep upper slopes. The long, winding corridor opens on to a valley of quince, walnut and wild cherry trees ringed with looming, jagged peaks. Sunlight flashes off the ice sheets. Crevices lie deep in snow. Choughs wheel over Imlil village, above which towers Morocco's most spectacular mountain retreat.

As an eager young British climber, Mike McHugo fell in love with the High Atlas. In 1989, he bought the abandoned summer home of a feudal chief and - in a unique partnership with the local community - transformed it into a secluded getaway. From the outset, his priorities have been collaboration and sustainability. All workmen and materials come from the local Berber community, as do its kind and attentive staff. Water is spring-fed, not trucked in bottled. Towels and sheets are changed only when necessary, not every day. Fruit, vegetables and meat are locally-sourced. A five per cent levy added to all guests' accommodation bills has FINANCED the valley's first ambulance and community hammam, as well as supporting the school and enabling local girls to continue their education in Asni.

Guests are truly welcomed with splashes of rose water, then ushered on to the lofty, many-carpeted roof terrace and guided to simple yet stylish bedrooms. Accommodation ranges from traditional Berber salons, which sleep groups of trekkers and extended families, to the beautiful Garden House, a self-contained, double-level sanctuary with two balconies. All the rooms have been decorated with the utmost care, in rich colours and with hand-carved wooden beams (no power tools were used during construction as electricity only reached the valley in 1997). At night, hot water bottles are secreted into beds, open fires lit and the lamps of the surrounding villages glisten like stars fallen to earth.

As well as the sincere hospitality, it is, of course, the mountains that make the Kasbah so special. Walks range from easy ambles to the two-day ascent of Jebel Toubkal - at 4,165 metres the highest peak in north Africa - and are led by personable local guides. Its remote trekking lodge, with solar-powered under-floor heating and en suite bedrooms, allows guests to stay in comfort even higher in the Toubkal Massif.

"I imagine a project like the Kasbah would not be possible without close and deep local ties", said McHugo recently. "I also believe that by our correct behaviour and respect for the local population, hopefully they have come to respect us and also accept some of our differences."

Travel opens new horizons, for traveller and host alike. Without tourism Imlil would be a poorer place, its Kasbah still a ruin, its girls denied the chance to attend high school, its entire population reliant on subsistence agriculture. The Kasbah du Toubkal has set a standard for responsible, collaborative tourism that is a positive force for change in the region.

Getting there

Double rooms at Kasbah du Toubkal from €160 (£129) B&B (minimum two-night stay), kasbahdutoubkal.com

Easyjet fly from London to Marrakech from about £115 one way

· Rory MacLean's latest book Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Indiais published by Penguin. His UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon are republished by IB Tauris this month.