Are there botanical gardens in Morocco?

This is one of my favourite questions to answer because Morocco's gardens are genuinely world-class, and they offer something the souks and sites can't: stillness. Marrakech is the heart of it. Jardin Majorelle is the famous one — the electric cobalt-blue villa and studio, restored by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, surrounded by bamboo, cacti, and water channels. It's busy, so I send people first thing in the morning, but the colour and calm are unforgettable. The Berber Museum and the YSL museum next door round it out.

If you want fewer crowds, Le Jardin Secret tucked inside the medina is my quiet recommendation — a restored riad garden built on classical Islamic principles, with a tower you can climb for rooftop views over the old city. And for sheer scale, Anima Garden, created by the Austrian artist André Heller out toward the Atlas foothills, is a surreal, dreamlike botanical park dotted with sculpture and bursts of planting; it has a shuttle from Marrakech and feels like stepping into another world.

Then there are the historic palatial gardens, which are botanical in a grander, older sense. The Menara, with its huge reflecting pool, olive grove, and pavilion framing the Atlas, is the postcard image of Marrakech. The Agdal gardens are vast royal orchards stretching south of the city. These aren't manicured flowerbeds — they're centuries-old engineering of water and shade, and they tell you a lot about how this civilisation tamed a hot climate.

Beyond Marrakech, the exotic gardens at Bouknadel near Rabat and various riad courtyards across the country keep the theme going. For honeymooners and slower travellers especially, I love building a garden or two into each city — they break up the intensity, they photograph beautifully, and they give you the cool, scented pause that makes the rest of the day land better. We time entries to dodge tour-bus peaks.