Welcome to Riad Maizie
Riad Maizie is a lovingly restored Riad in the heart of the Marrakech Medina - It is 5 minutes walk from the souks and 10 minutes walk from Djemaa el Fna
If you are taking a trip to Marrakech, Riad Maizie is a tranquil spot for you to stay whilst exploring the hustle, bustle and beauty of Marrakech.
Welcome to a little piece of paradise. Riad Maizie is a Riad in the very oldest part of this fortified city, begun by Abu-Bakr Ibn-Umar in May 1070. The local mosque is the original one, around which everything else followed. Morocco was once ‘The Kingdom of Marrakech’, and the Medina of Marrakech, ‘The Red City’, is now a UNESCO heritage site. It is also the largest market in Morocco. The thing is, Marrakech is a secret city whose interesting mysteries and contradictions take place behind windowless exterior walls and heavy doors. A plain unprepossessing entrance may conceal a palace within.
Dan (Pearce) and I (Miranda Innes) first saw our lovely Riad Maizie in 2001 from the rooftop of the house next door. We peered down, in gathering twilight, and saw a spacious, open courtyard, at the time paved with old tiles that looked – in the gloom and from that distance – like the weathered Harris tweed of some fusty don’s leather-elbowed jacket. The house looked to have soothing proportions, and we could dimly perceive an arcaded gallery along one side. After seeing maybe thirty other riads in various stages of dilapidation and multi-occupancy, our hearts beat faster, hoping that this long-empty house would be the one. We visited the next morning. I have described what we found in my book ‘Cinnamon City’. Despite its air of being dustily becalmed in time, we loved it. The courtyard was open and airy – an effect that we have unintentionally replaced by subaqueous coolness thanks our enthusiastic planting – and the rooms are very slightly wider than average.
Marrakech is a city masquerading as a village via a circus. At first sight, straying through Djemaa el Fna, with its acrobats and false teeth vendors, story-tellers and snake charmers, monkey-men and water-sellers might put you in mind of a collaboration between Georg Grosz and the brothers Grimm, filmed by Fellini. Dig a little deeper and you will find that the city is alive with the sophisticated excitements and events you might hope for in the favourite city of King Mohammed VI. But at the same time you will quickly get to recognise the locals, and they’ll greet you like old friends within a couple of days.
The King is a cosmopolitan, he welcomes foreign tourists, and under his auspices women gained equal rights re marriage, divorce and the ownership of property in 2004. In 2006, 50 women graduated in Rabat, the capital, to become murshidats, female spiritual guides, authorised to advise about the new Mudawwah (the official family code) and to undertake all the religious ceremonies bar Friday prayers. Women may still wear the djellaba of invisibility much of the time in Morocco, they may still suffer from half the literacy rate of men, and rarely speak any language other than Arabic, but it was two women – Fatima Al-Fihri, encouraged by her sister Mariam – who in 857 inaugurated the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fez, credited by the Guinness book of World Records as being the oldest continuously operating degree-granting university in the world. I know it’s pathetic, but I have to have a short gloat about that. If you are lucky, you may discover that the women of Marrakech are much more lively than the discreet tent-clad apparitions who shuffle past the vegetable stalls to buy two tomatoes would suggest.
Marrakech absolutely lives up to its exotic promise. You can walk home peacefully after eating an excellent dinner beneath the constellations of naked light bulbs in Djemaa el Fna via the Magic Souk, its hectic buzz strangely empty but for four cats at this time – where by day you can jostle among the throng of hat and basket sellers to pick up dried road-kill hedgehogs to burn for good fortune, or live scorpions for a spell to ensure the fidelity of an errant husband. You can stare in frank astonishment at the motley collection of objects for sale in the Slave Market – where slaves were still pinched and prodded less than a century ago. You can buy a love potion, nigella seeds to clear your sinuses a la Berber pharmaceuticals, a gimbri, heavy silver and amber necklaces, henna tattoos, a djellaba or a gandora, a pair of blinding yellow camel skin babouches or a sequinned belly dancing outfit with those rigid conical bosoms that Madonna might have sported twenty years ago.
On the other hand, your adventures might take place while quietly sipping a coffee in the Cafe France or picking at a sheep’s head or a bowl of snails at restaurant number 3 in the Square. It is always good policy to start a conversation with the neighbouring diners. The people who enjoy Marrakech almost all score top marks on the fascination scale – you may find the old guy ogling every passing female as he eats his breakfast is a justly renowned portrait painter whose subjects have included the royalty of several countries. The dark eyed young man ordering potato cakes in the open-air restaurant might be an international Islamic scholar, son of an illustrious father. The neat blonde woman knocking back an early orange juice could well be the Dutch chef who gives classes in Moroccan cuisine. The friendly owner of a tiny cupboard-like musical instrument shop may be the very man to organise a trip to the mountains or the desert. And the tall, good-looking creature gazing thoughtfully into space is quite possibly planning an evening of Gnawa music, Sufism and trance, and will tell you all about the chakra-like system of nafs, qalb and ruh, attention to which may change your life.
Riad Maizie is an intricate sampler of traditional decorative techniques. What was extraordinary about the restoration was that every inch of the building has been worked on and embellished, and the other amazing thing is that, apart from a bicycle and 3 lightbulbs, there was nothing to tell a time traveller from 500 years ago that he had wandered into the future. Moroccan rooms are usually long, narrow and multipurpose, their walls typically lined with narrow banquettes upon which people lounge, eat and sleep. Lovely details that came with the house – the delicate wrought iron-work that acts like lace curtains at the windows, the huge magnificent and complicated painted doors to the courtyard bedrooms and the pink room, the fine old painted ceilings in the pink room and the gallery, the complex polychrome Gibb’s carving in the pink room alcove. We added the dark doors to the Green Room, carved and painted in the Berber style, all the tadelakt, carved in some areas with a technique whose name I have forgotten, all the Gibb’s Frieze and the Zillig Fessi, (there must be a kilometre of hand-carved Gibb’s frieze around doors, walls and windows, and half an acre of zillig fessi, tiny mosaic pieces cut individually from 6” glazed tiles from Fez) and the floors.