Le jardin de la Ménara

The Ménara garden sits at the western edge of the city, a vast olive grove established in the twelfth century by the Almohad dynasty and maintained, with various degrees of care, ever since. The trees are old enough to be massive, their trunks gnarled to the diameter of small rooms, and the grove stretches far enough that the city noise, audible at the entrance, fades to nothing after a few minutes of walking. At the center of the grove is a large rectangular basin, several hundred meters across, fed by an ancient underground irrigation network that still functions. A nineteenth-century pavilion stands at its edge, its green-tiled roof reflected in the water, and behind it, on clear days, the snow-covered peaks of the High Atlas mountains complete the view in a way that no postcard has ever quite captured accurately. Families come here in the afternoons, particularly at weekends, to sit along the water's edge or walk the olive paths in the cooler temperatures under the canopy. The Ménara is the opposite of the curated, architecturally intense spaces of the Medina. It is large, unpretentious, quietly ancient, and the Atlas backdrop makes it one of the most genuinely beautiful spots in the city. The irrigation network that feeds the basin is Almohad in origin, a system of underground channels drawing from the Atlas foothills that has been maintained across nine centuries with relatively minor modifications. Water arrives at the pool from below ground, sustaining the olive trees and the basin in a climate where evaporation is constant.