Servants and Guards Burial Section
At the far edge of the Saadian Tombs complex, away from the carved stucco and Italian marble of the royal chambers, the ground opens into a garden where roughly sixty low graves lie in open air. These are the tombs of the servants and guards — the people who attended the Saadian court in life and were buried close to it in death. Their markers are modest by comparison: slabs of Fes zellige tilework or plain Carrara stone set flush with the earth, a tiled path winding between them through whatever greenery the season allows.
It is the one part of the site that gives you a sense of scale — not architectural scale, but human scale. The dynasty that commissioned cedar ceilings and azure ceramics also kept its household staff close in death.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to mention the same thing: linger here before you enter the main mausoleums, not after. The garden resets your eye. You read the tilework on a servant's grave differently once you've seen where the sultan is buried — and the other way around just as much.
How Servants and Guards Burial Section came to be
The Saadian sultans began using this ground as a necropolis in the sixteenth century. Moulay Abdallah al-Ghalib built the first mausoleum between 1557 and 1574; his successor Ahmad al-Mansur, who came to power in 1578, expanded the entire complex into what survives today. The garden section — where servants and soldiers were interred — was always peripheral to the royal chambers but continuous with them, a single enclosed world of the dead.
When Ahmad al-Mansur died in 1603 during a plague epidemic, the dynasty was already weakening. The Alaouite sultan Moulay Ismail later sealed the entire complex behind a walled passageway rather than demolish it — a practical form of preservation. The site stayed largely unknown until aerial photographs commissioned in 1917 brought it back to wider attention.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring (March to April) and autumn (late September through mid-November) offer the most manageable temperatures for standing in an open garden; summer afternoons can push well past 35°C, so an early-morning visit matters more then. Winter days are mild but can turn grey and cool by late afternoon.
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.