Saadian Tombs

Behind a plain wall in the old royal quarter of Marrakesh lies one of the most lavish burial places in the Islamic west. The Saadian Tombs are a walled garden cemetery set against the back of the Kasbah Mosque, its paths lined with graves covered in coloured tiles, and at its heart stand two mausoleums whose interiors are a dense web of carved stucco, cedar wood, marble and glazed tilework. Many art historians see them as the summit of Moroccan architecture under the Saadian dynasty, which ruled the country in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

The site was already a burial ground before the Saadians: the Marinid sultan Abu al-Hasan was laid here briefly in 1351 before being moved to Chellah near Rabat, and his marble tombstone survives inside. The eastern mausoleum began as a small square chamber raised by Sultan Abdallah al-Ghalib between 1557 and 1574 over the grave of his father, Muhammad al-Shaykh, founder of the dynasty. The great builder was Ahmad al-Mansur, the richest and most powerful Saadian ruler (1578–1603). He first enlarged the eastern tomb with loggias and a large hall, then turned to an entirely new western mausoleum for himself. Its central Chamber of the Twelve Columns, a square room about 10 metres across and 12 metres high, is the high point of the complex: twelve columns of Carrara marble in groups of three carry small muqarnas arches carved from marble rather than the usual wood or plaster. Al-Mansur was buried at its centre in 1603, and several of his successors were placed beside him under finely carved marble tombstones. In the adjoining prayer hall the decoration around the mihrab was left only partly carved, probably because work stopped at the sultan's death.

After the dynasty fell, the necropolis was gradually closed off from the surrounding streets and forgotten by outsiders. In 1917 the Moroccan antiquities service of the French protectorate period took it in hand, restored the badly decayed chambers, and opened them to the public for the first time. Marrakesh itself, founded in the 11th century and for long periods the capital of Moroccan dynasties, keeps its walled medina as a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the tombs stand in its southern part, in the Kasbah district that the Almohads laid out as a royal citadel in the late 12th century.

Getting there

The tombs are in the Kasbah quarter of the Marrakesh medina, next to the Kasbah Mosque in the southern part of the old city, about 2 km from the centre of Marrakesh. The nearest airport is Marrakesh Menara Airport (RAK), about 5 km away.