Hôtel Es Saadi
The pool at Es Saadi wraps around a century-old palm tree, and that detail tells you something about the place — it was built around what was already here, not bulldozed flat and started over. Jean Bauchet, who once ran the Moulin Rouge in Paris, bought twenty acres of empty land just outside Marrakech's medina walls in the early 1950s and planted something entirely his own.
The resort now spans eight hectares of private gardens — palm, banana, olive, bougainvillea, Marrakech roses — divided between the original hotel, a newer palace wing, and Morocco's first casino, which Bauchet opened in 1952 before the hotel itself existed. The walls carry a 1950s feeling that isn't nostalgia so much as continuity.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to anchor themselves in the gardens rather than the rooms. Le Jardin d'Hiver terrace at breakfast, before the heat builds, is a recurring mention — shaded, unhurried, good aperitifs in the evening too. The Theatro nightclub doesn't get going until around 2:30am, which is either a reason to stay up or a reason to ask for a room on the far side of the property.
How Hôtel Es Saadi came to be
Jean Bauchet came to Marrakech in the 1950s and stayed. The former Moulin Rouge manager chose land just beyond the medina walls — the only place Moroccan law permitted a casino — and inaugurated the Casino de Marrakech in 1952, the first of its kind in the country. The hotel building followed, opening sometime in the mid-to-late 1950s or 1966 depending on the source, and was renovated in the early 1990s. The casino was fully refurbished in 2003.
Bauchet's daughter, Élisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal, took over and added the Palace wing in 2008, commissioning a 914-square-metre spa built around a centuries-old eucalyptus tree. She also assembled one of Morocco's largest private art collections, curated under the name "From Morocco with Love," which hangs throughout the Palace. The resort has been a partner of the Marrakech International Film Festival since 2001.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Marrakech winters run mild — roughly 8 to 20°C from November through March — which is when the gardens are at their most pleasant and the heated hotel pool earns its keep. Summer temperatures push well past 35°C, making the shade of those eight hectares less a luxury than a necessity.
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.