Grande Cour (Great Courtyard)
At 1,500 square metres, the Grande Cour stops you mid-step. Italian Carrara marble stretches the full length of a space built by a man who was, for a few years in the 1890s, the effective ruler of Morocco — and who wanted visitors to understand that immediately. A rectangular fountain sits at the centre where the zellige paths cross, its smaller round basin catching the light that pours in from the open sky above.
The coloured wooden galleries running along all four sides give onto roughly 80 rooms, most of them once part of Ba Ahmed's harem. Bright yellow and blue ceramic screens fill the arches above the gallery imposts, their vegetal carving done in the Andalusian style the palace's architect, Muhammad ibn Makki al-Misfiwi, had absorbed from years of work in Spain.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to note two things: the east end's grand hall — 20 by 8 metres, with painted ceiling decoration that outclasses almost everything else in the building — and the way the marble gets genuinely slippery after a morning of foot traffic. Flat-soled shoes matter more here than in the garden sections.
How Grande Cour (Great Courtyard) came to be
The marble-paved courtyard was laid down in 1896–97 under Ba Ahmed ibn Musa, the grand vizier who became Morocco's de facto ruler after Sultan Hassan I died in 1894, leaving a sixteen-year-old heir. Ba Ahmed commissioned architect Muhammad ibn Makki al-Misfiwi — originally from Safi, trained partly in Andalusia — to execute the decoration, and the Spanish influence is visible in every carved screen and arabesque along the galleries.
Ba Ahmed died of disease in 1900, and within hours Sultan Abdelaziz had the palace stripped of valuables. The courtyard survived, though it needed significant restoration, completed in 2018. The September 2023 earthquake caused damage elsewhere in the complex; the palace closed briefly and reopened to visitors in October 2023.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
April, May, and October bring warm temperatures and the kind of angled light that makes the marble and tilework worth photographing. In summer, the courtyard's thick surrounding walls keep the air noticeably cooler than the medina streets outside.
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.