CREATIVE & YOGA RETREATS IN
MOROCCO
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YOU HAVE A RENDEZ-VOUS WITH INSPIRATION, BE PREPARED TO BE TRANSFORMED
This photograph shot last week takes me back twenty years ago... I was pregnant with my first child. And somehow, Marrakech seemed to know before I did. The city adjusted itself to my growing belly, to my emotions swinging wildly between wonder and vulnerability. My husband, a Marrakchi born and raised, wanted to treat me. He had prepared a veal tanjia (a thoughtful detail, because I didn’t like lamb or mutton).
As tradition requires, the pot was entrusted to the hammam, where tanjias are buried deep in the glowing ashes of an underground world, watched over by the men who know how to speak the language of fire. Later, he went to retrieve it.
He left me in the car with my best friend Beatriz @kasbahbabourika — Portuguese by birth, Marrakchia at heart, and just as in love with this sweetly mad city as I was.
A few minutes later my hubsband came running back, eyes shining.
“Girls, you have to see this.”
We followed him down a narrow alley near Rmila, on rue Fatima Ezzohra. He motioned for us to come inside. Under the hammam. A cave. A den. A hidden world.And then he appeared. A character straight out of a Marrakchi folktale : short, muscular, bare-chested, his skin blackened with soot. He emerged from the shadows like a mischievous genie. Laughing, pounding his chest like Tarzan.
“Welcome, my princesses!”He knew I was pregnant and seemed proud to receive us. But more than that, he had prepared something extraordinary. A feast. A scene.
On the floor, an improvised table. A cloth that was not quite a tablecloth. Mismatched plates. Plastic flowers nailed to the wall.
A magical cave, and in the corner the still-warm mountain of ashes from the hammam, where the tanjias cook, where the city hides its small mysteries. My husband looked at us, half apologetic, half moved.
“I couldn’t refuse his invitation… when I saw what he had arranged for us.”
So we sat down. Around the tanjia. No smartphones. No flash.
Just wide-open eyes, and hearts filled with the kind of laughter, tender and incredulous, that you never forget.
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#marrakechphotographer #travelphotography #lifestylephotographer
There are places you somehow never visit when you live in a city.
I lived in Marrakech for years, and yet I had never stepped inside Denise Masson’s riad @maisondenisemasson.ifm
A French scholar and writer, she devoted her life to translating the Coran into French, choosing to settle in the medina, between languages, between worlds.
I’m working on a book about Marrakech, about belonging and memory. And there I was, discovering her riad for the first time.
Perhaps that’s what time does. It rearranges the map.
Maybe writing this book is also about entering rooms I once walked past.
Wandering now through spaces I used to move around without noticing, I’m reminded that a city is never fully known, even when you think you belong to it.
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#marrakechphotographer #travelphotography #lifestylephotographer
Being here this time feels different.
Not because I haven’t been coming back regularly. I have. Three or four times a year, for work, for friends, for pleasure. But this time I am here with intention. I am not staying with friends, not slipping into familiar rhythms, not trying to carve out a few stolen hours for myself between social moments. I am here with time. Real time. And that changes everything.
It is unusually cold. The sky has been grey. I caught a proper cold within days of arriving, which doesn’t help. There is something almost ironic in falling ill in a city I once associated only with heat and light.And yet, beneath the weather and the fatigue, something else is happening.
Last night I shared a bowl of harira with the night guardian at the riad. We spoke about family, about exile, about the fine nuances of darija. Here, even “aunt” and “uncle” are not simple words. They shift depending on whether they belong to your mother’s side or your father’s. Language maps belonging with extraordinary precision.
I keep thinking of something someone once told me: look at the people. Without them, nothing has meaning.
The monuments, the light, the colour of the walls, they are not the soul. THE PEOPLE ARE THE TEXTURE. They give depth to the surface. They carry the layers.
Perhaps that is what feels different now. Less about revisiting places I once knew by heart, more about sitting inside conversations, letting them unfold without rushing.
I have been coming back for years. But maybe this book is not about returning. Maybe it is about learning how to be here differently. Learning how to see again.
@riadalmassarah
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#marrakechphotographer #riadalmassarah #gauderartresidency
I was 26 when I moved to Marrakech, certain that I had found something extraordinary.
More than twenty years later, I’m writing a book about that relationship and about everything it has become since.
This is not a nostalgic tribute.
Nor a guide.
It’s an attempt to understand how a city transforms us over time, and how we, in return, reshape the way we see it.
I no longer live there full time, but I keep going back.
Each return reveals something different.
I’m gathering voices across generations, natives, expats, younger Marrakchis, to explore what the city means today.
Because places don’t stay still.
And neither do we.
Leaving this week for a new artist residency @riadalmassarah , open to whatever the city might show me now.
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#marrakechphotographer #travelphotography #lifestylephotographer
When the light hits just right, and "flâneries" are plotted with @mariemersier over something sparkling
When I’m both directing the frame and stepping into it
@hotelballu always makes an excellent stage
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#lifestylephotographer #condenasttraveller #travelphotography
