Café de France (Gueliz)
The first thing you notice walking into Gueliz from the Medina is the width of the street. Boulevard Mohammed V opens up where the alleys close behind you — shoulders drop, stride lengthens, the city changes register entirely. This is the grid the French planned in the protectorate era, west of the old walls, and it still functions the way it was intended: a place where people live, eat lunch on a weekday, and don't particularly perform being in Marrakech.
Café de France sits within that texture. The neighbourhood around it runs on espresso and Avenue Mohammed V's Art Deco facades, with Kechmara anchoring the café culture on nearby Rue de la Liberté and the Marché Central a short walk away for provisions that have nothing to do with tourists.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back to Gueliz tend to stop performing sightseeing and start using the neighbourhood. They pick up bread at the Marché Central, walk Avenue Hassan II in the late afternoon when the light is low, and find a table somewhere on Mohammed V to sit with a coffee and watch the city move at its own pace — not the Medina's pace.
How Café de France (Gueliz) came to be
Gueliz was laid out during the French Protectorate as Marrakech's nouvelle ville — a planned grid dropped alongside, but deliberately separate from, the Medina. The bones of that era are still visible: the Church of Saints-Martyrs went up in 1928, designed by architect Henri Prost. The Ciné-Theater Palace followed in 1926, built as an exact replica of the Eden Cinema in La Ciotat and eventually hosting performers including Nat King Cole and Rita Hayworth.
The Grand Café de la Poste, also from the 1920s, served simultaneously as café and postal point — the kind of double function that tells you something about how colonial infrastructure worked. Jacques Majorelle was among those who passed through. The neighbourhood has been quietly modernising ever since, without ever quite erasing those protectorate proportions.
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring and autumn are the easiest times to be on foot here — March and April are warm but manageable, though a south wind can push temperatures unexpectedly high. Summer is dry and intense, often above 35°C by midday; winter days are mild and often sunny, but nights can drop close to freezing.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.