Palais des Congrès de Marrakech
The Palais des Congrès de Marrakech sits on Boulevard Mohamed VI in Hivernage, the district of wide avenues lined with olive and palm trees where the Atlas Mountains occasionally appear at the end of a long straight road. This is not a place you wander into — it opens for events, closes between them, and its 5,600 square metres of halls and meeting rooms exist almost entirely on an international schedule.
What draws people here are the events themselves: the Marrakech International Film Festival fills the Auditorium des Ministres, which holds 1,606 seats and is, by capacity, the largest auditorium in Morocco. The comedy festival Marrakech du Rire uses the same stage. Between those moments, the building belongs to diplomats and delegates.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back for the film festival tend to stay at the Mövenpick Mansour Eddahbi, which is physically part of the same complex — you can move between a screening and your room without stepping outside. Book that hotel early; festival week fills it completely, and the convenience is real.
How Palais des Congrès de Marrakech came to be
The Palais des Congrès opened on 30 October 1989, inaugurated by King Hassan II alongside then-owner Abdelhadi Alami Srifi. Within five years it had hosted a moment of genuine global weight: the signing of the WTO Agreement (the final act of the GATT negotiations) in April 1994, which brought trade ministers from around the world to Marrakech.
The building underwent a major renovation in 2016 at a cost of 754 million dirhams, after which management passed to Mövenpick Hotels and Resorts. That same year, on 16 November 2016, it hosted the first African Action Summit on the margins of COP22. In 2023, the IMF and World Bank held their annual meetings here — a reminder that the building's ambitions have always been calibrated to an international audience.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Hivernage sits in the open city rather than the sheltered Medina, so the heat of a Marrakech summer is felt directly on the wide avenues. October through May gives you mild days and cool evenings — which also happens to align with the film festival and most of the major conference season.
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.