Eastern Pavilion (Koubba)
What you're standing in was once called the Pavilion of Gold — or, in another telling, the Pavilion of Crystal. Neither name survives in stone. Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur built this eastern koubba in the late sixteenth century for his private use alone, and it opened onto a Crystal Garden to the east. Today the structure is gone, reduced to foundations and the ghost of an underground water system that still traces the courtyard beneath your feet.
The absence is the point. You're reading a palace through its ruins, and the Eastern Pavilion is one of the most eloquent gaps in that reading.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return to El Badi tend to linger here longer than they planned. The trick is to crouch down near the exposed infrastructure — the old channels and cisterns — and let the scale of what was lost register slowly. The 135-by-110-metre courtyard stretches away from you, and the silence does the rest.
How Eastern Pavilion (Koubba) came to be
Ahmad al-Mansur, the Saadian sultan whose epithet al-Dahabi — 'the Golden' — said everything about his ambitions, began El Badi Palace in 1578. The Eastern Pavilion, known as Qubbat az-Zujaj or Qubbat ad-Dahab, stood at the far end of the great courtyard and was reserved entirely for the sultan's private use. Construction continued until al-Mansur's death in 1603.
The pavilion did not outlast the dynasty by long. When the Alawite sultan Moulay Ismail transferred the capital to Meknes in 1672, he systematically stripped El Badi of everything portable — marble, tiles, cedar, gold leaf. The looting took twelve years. What remains of the Eastern Pavilion is foundation work, underground channels, and the outline of a room that was once considered among the finest in the Mediterranean world.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring (March to May) and autumn (late September to November) are the most comfortable seasons — daytime temperatures sit between 20°C and 28°C, though April and May can spike higher. Summer afternoons in the open courtyard are genuinely brutal, with July and August regularly exceeding 40°C.
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.