Café du Livre
Tucked inside the private courtyard of Hotel Le Toulousain on Rue Tarik Ibn Ziad, Café du Livre is the kind of place Gueliz locals treat as a second living room. Roughly two thousand books line the shelves — paperbacks, novels, travel writing, things left behind by passing readers — and you're welcome to pull one down with your coffee. By day the room is quiet enough to hear the pages turn. By early evening, with happy hour running on selected drinks, the bar counter fills and the conversation does the rest.
It sits just behind Carré Eden Mall, next to the Italian restaurant Catanzaro — easy to walk past if you don't know to look for the courtyard entrance. That slight obscurity is part of why it works.
💛 What travellers fall for
Regulars tend to arrive mid-morning with a laptop, order a coffee, and resurface at lunch without quite meaning to. The Monday English Quiz draws a reliably mixed crowd — expats, language students, curious visitors. Weekend evenings bring live music, so if you want the quiet reading-room version, come before six.
How Café du Livre came to be
Café du Livre was founded by two teachers from the American School of Marrakech, who wanted somewhere in Gueliz that combined books, decent coffee, and a bar — a combination the neighbourhood was missing. The exact year of founding is unverified, but the place has accumulated the worn-in quality of somewhere that has been a reliable constant through several cycles of the city's rapid change.
Its roots in the expatriate teaching community still show in the programming — the English-language quiz night, the international book stock — without making it feel exclusive. It ended up becoming one of the more genuinely mixed spaces in the district.
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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.