Things to Do in Marrakech: Complete Guide 2026

Planning your trip? See our Discover Marrakech guide: itineraries, how many days and when to visit.

Activities at Riad Vendôme

Moroccan cooking class - Learn the tagine with Chef Naima. Market shopping + cooking + rooftop tasting. From €48/person. The cooking class with Chef Naima.

Hammam & Massage: Private oriental hammam, black soap scrub, massage argan. From €48. See the treatments.

Cuisine + Spa: Perfect half-day trip: cooking class morning + spa afternoon. €97/person. Programme.

Sport & Adventure

Golf - 11 courses (Royal Golf, Amelkis, Samanah…). Packages riad + green fees from €275. Golf stay.

Quad & Buggy in the desert Agafay: 2 to 3 hours, lunar landscapes. €40-70/person.

Hot air balloon flight: Fly over the Palmeraie at sunrise. €150-200/person.

Zipline at Terres d'Amanar: Course accrobranche valley Ourika. €30-50.

Karting: Circuit pro to 20 min.

Paintball - Outdoor field, ideal groups and team building.

Discovery & Culture

Medina visit: Souks, Jemaa El-Fna, Ben Youssef Madrasa, Bahia Palace, Saadian Tombs. All on foot from the riad.

Ride on camelback: Palmeraie or desert Agafay at sunset. €25-40.

Excursions

Ourika, Essaouira, Ouzoud, Agafay, Oukaimeden. All our excursions.

Éric organises everything: +212 600 608 608

Follow us: @riadvendome on Instagram

Top 10 Things to Do in Marrakech - Éric's Picks

Since 2007 in Marrakech, here are the experiences Éric recommends to every guest:

1. Traditional hammam: the essential Marrakech experience. At Riad Vendôme, from €25/person in a private setting. 2. Jemaa El-Fna at sunset: the world's greatest open-air theatre: musicians, storytellers, food stalls, snake charmers. 10 minutes walk from the riad. 3. Moroccan cooking class: learn to cook tagine and couscous with Chef Naima, from €28/person. 4. The souks: 3-4 hours exploring spice markets, leather tanneries, artisan workshops. Best with a guide (from €13/person). 5. Aït Benhaddou: UNESCO ksar, 2.5h from Marrakech, backdrop to Gladiator and Game of Thrones.

6. Quad biking in the Agafay desert: 30 minutes from the medina, lunar landscape, from €40/person. 7. Koutoubia Mosque & Majorelle Garden: the two iconic Marrakech landmarks, both free or low-cost. 8. Sahara desert circuit: 3-5 days, Merzouga dunes, camel trek, luxury bivouac. The standout memory of any Morocco trip. 9. Rooftop dinner: dozens of medina rooftops with panoramic views and tagines under the stars. 10. Day trip to Essaouira: the Atlantic blue-and-white port city, 3h from Marrakech, famous for wind, fresh fish and the film Othello.

Annual Events in Marrakech

Marrakech welcomes major events all year round. In January, the Marathon International of Marrakech attracts thousands of runners under the winter sun. At the end of November, the Festival International of the Film transforms Place Jemaa El-Fna into an open-air cinema. In December, experience a Christmas in the sun or an unforgettable New Year's Eve on our rooftop.

Your First Day Versus Your Third Day

The most useful thing to understand about Marrakech is that your first day and your third day want completely different things from you. On the first day you are still decoding the place: the noise, the light, the way a lane narrows and then opens without warning. Anything ambitious on that first afternoon tends to be wasted, because most of your attention is going on simply staying oriented. By the third day the same walk costs you almost nothing, and you begin noticing what you walked past twice without seeing.

So we tell guests to keep the first day deliberately thin. Arrive, put the bags down, drink the mint tea, sit on the rooftop while the call to prayer moves across the medina, and then go out for a short loop with no destination you are obliged to reach. If you want one fixed point on that first day, make it Jemaa El-Fna in the late afternoon, and make it a walk rather than a visit. You are not there to see anything in particular. You are there to let the scale of the city settle.

By the second and third day your appetite changes. You want interiors, detail and craft: palace rooms, a madrasa courtyard, a workshop where somebody is actually working. You have also worked out by then which streets you like, which makes the whole city cheaper in energy. It is why we would rather see guests book their cooking class or their traditional hammam for the middle of a stay than for the day they land. You enjoy both far more once you are no longer running on travel adrenaline.

Choose by Mood, Not by List

Most guides hand you a ranked list and leave you to work out when to use it. That is the wrong shape for this city, because Marrakech is unusually sensitive to weather, heat, energy and the hour of the day. It is far more useful to ask what kind of day you actually have in you, and then choose accordingly.

• A slow day: a long breakfast, a garden, a rooftop, a hammam in the afternoon, dinner without going far. No monuments at all. This is the day guests are most surprised to have loved.
• A busy day: start early, while the light is still soft and the lanes are half empty, and do your walking and your sights before lunch. Trying to carry that pace through the afternoon is how people end up exhausted and short-tempered.
• A day too hot to move: treat the middle of the day as unusable and plan around it. Water, shade, a courtyard, a long lunch, a nap. Marrakech has always organised itself this way; visitors are the only ones fighting it.
• A rainy day: it does rain here, and when it does the lanes run with water and half the plans dissolve. Interiors save the day: museum rooms, palace interiors, a covered stretch of souk, a cookery class, a spa afternoon.
• An evening with nothing planned - the easiest evening to enjoy and the one people most often waste worrying about. Walk towards the square, eat somewhere with a view, come back the way you came.

Match the activity to the mood and you will rarely have a bad day here. Match it to a list written at home weeks in advance, in a different climate and a different frame of mind, and you will occasionally have a miserable one.

The Famous Sights, Treated Honestly

Almost every visitor arrives with the same shortlist, and it is a good shortlist. But the sights on it are not equal, and they are certainly not equal at every hour. Our honest view, after years of sending guests out and listening to what they say when they come back:

Worth the queue. The great palace interiors and the madrasa courtyard repay patience, because what you have come for is the room itself: the carved cedar, the zellige, the proportions of a courtyard built to be cool and quiet. These are places where standing still is the entire point, and where the crowd matters less than you fear, since you can wait for a corner to empty and then have it to yourself for a minute.

Far better early. Anything with a courtyard, a garden or a narrow entrance is transformed by arriving as it opens rather than mid-morning. The difference is not marginal. The same garden that feels like a queue in the middle of the day feels like a private commission shortly after opening. If you take only one piece of advice from this page, take this one.

Reasonably skippable. Some of the smaller ticketed sights are photogenic in pictures and thin in person, and a few of the celebrated viewpoints are really just the roof of somewhere that would like to sell you something. If your time is short, drop the marginal ones without guilt. No guest has ever told us they regretted missing a minor museum.

What people genuinely regret. Never a monument. The regrets we hear are always the same ones: not going up to a rooftop at sunset, not eating twice at the place they liked, not sitting in a garden long enough to stop checking the time, and leaving the hammam until the final afternoon when there was no space left to give them. Those are the things guests write to us about afterwards.

The Medina by Day and the Medina After Dark

The same street is two different places depending on the hour, and understanding that is worth more than any list of addresses. In daylight the medina is commercial and quick: deliveries, mopeds, shutters going up, the whole machinery of a working city that happens also to be beautiful. You are moving through somebody's workplace. The souks are at their most vivid in the morning, when the light comes down in shafts through the slatted roofs and the traders are unhurried because the day is young.

After dark the same lanes empty of commerce and fill with residents. Shopfronts close, the noise drops, families come out, and the pace turns domestic. Streets that felt like a scrum at noon become quiet enough to hear your own footsteps on the stone. Most first-time visitors assume the medina at night will be intimidating; those who go out and try it usually find the opposite: softer, slower and a good deal more human than the daytime version.

Jemaa El-Fna runs the other way. It is quiet and fairly ordinary in the middle of the day, then fills steadily from late afternoon into a full open-air performance. Watching that fill happen is itself one of the better things to do in Marrakech, and it costs nothing at all. Find somewhere to sit above it, order something, and give it a proper hour rather than a passing glance.

What to Do With Half a Day

Half a day is the unit most itineraries handle badly. It is too short for anything that needs a car and too long to fill with a coffee, so people default to drifting and then feel they wasted it. In fact the half day is the most useful block you have, because almost everything genuinely worth doing inside the city fits it exactly.

• A morning half day: a Moroccan cooking class that starts at the market and ends with you eating what you made, folding shopping, learning and lunch into a single block.
• An afternoon half day: hammam and massage, then nothing. This is the correct use of a hot afternoon and it resets the rest of the stay. See our spa in Marrakech.
• A late-afternoon half day: a couple of monuments at most, walked between rather than driven, finishing on a rooftop as the light goes.
• A first-morning half day: the souks in the company of somebody who knows them, which turns a stressful hour into an interesting one and makes every later visit easier.
• An arrival or departure half day: do not try to force a sight into it. Use the pool, the terrace and the courtyard, and leave the city calm.

The arrival and departure halves are the ones guests most often try to overload. A stay that ends with a rushed monument and a scramble for the airport ends badly, and that is the version you will remember. A stay that ends with a slow morning at the riad ends well.

Doing Less, Better

We would honestly rather you enjoyed three things properly than rushed through eight. That is not modesty about the city; it is simply what we observe. Guests who fill every slot with a monument go home with photographs and very few memories, because the day was spent in transit and in the low-level stress of running late for the next thing. Guests who plan one anchor per day, and leave the rest open, go home with stories.

There is a particular failure worth naming: the five-monument day. On paper it works, since the distances inside the medina are walkable. In practice every stop takes longer than expected, the heat compounds, lunch gets skipped, and by the fourth courtyard nobody is really looking at anything. You come away unable to recall which carved ceiling belonged to which building. A pair of monuments, unhurried, with a long lunch in between, will stay with you for years.

The same logic applies to shopping, to eating and to the souks. One long browse through a quarter you have taken to beats a forced march through all of them. One restaurant you return to beats a different address every night. Marrakech rewards repetition far more than it rewards coverage, and the guests who love the city most are usually the ones who saw the least of it.

The Things Nobody Puts on Their List

Ask guests at checkout what they will actually remember, and it is almost never the ticketed item. It is the small, unbooked hour they fell into by accident.

A rooftop at sunset. The medina is low and flat, so the roofline reads as one continuous ochre plain with the mountains behind it and the minarets standing out of it. The light changes quickly and then it is gone. Go up earlier than you think you need to.

A hammam in the middle of the afternoon. Not in the evening, when you are tired already, but in the dead heat, when the city has stopped anyway. You come out slow and clean into the cool of the courtyard, and the evening that follows is a different evening entirely. It is the most underused hour of a Marrakech day.

An hour in a garden, doing nothing. Not a visit with a route through it, but an hour on a bench, in shade, with water somewhere nearby. Marrakech gardens were built for precisely this and are now used almost entirely for photographs.

Watching the square fill up. Arrive before it happens rather than once it has. The interest is in the assembly: the carts arriving, the smoke starting, the crowd thickening in a way that looks like chaos and is in fact the same choreography repeated every evening.

Breakfast with no plan attached. A long breakfast on a terrace with nowhere to be is not a wasted morning. It is very often the morning guests describe first when they get home.

None of these needs booking and none of them costs much. They are simply the things that fall off an itinerary built for maximum coverage. If you would like the wider planning done for you, when to come, how many days to give it, how to shape the week, our Discover Marrakech guide covers that side, and if you do want to leave the city for a day, everything beyond the walls sits on our excursions from Marrakech page.

Do It All: Our All-Inclusive Activities Package

If you want to experience the essentials of Marrakech without planning each activity separately, Riad Vendôme offers a 4-Day All-Inclusive Activities Package that bundles the most popular experiences mentioned on this page into one fixed-price booking. Perfect for first-time visitors and couples who want a worry-free Marrakech stay.

Group rates available: 4 guests €495/person, 6+ guests €450/person. For full riad private hire (10-15 guests), request a custom quote on WhatsApp. Book direct with the owner.

Book the Activities Package: +212 600 608 608

(Reply within minutes from Éric or Naima personally)

The Riad Vendôme is classified by the Moroccan Ministry of Tourism.

See also: Stays & Programmes - every Riad Vendôme itinerary in one place.

Planning your sightseeing? See our guide to what to see in Marrakech: must-see monuments and walking distances from the medina.