What is the history of Marrakech?

I always tell guests that Marrakech began as a desert idea. Around 1070 the Almoravids, Berber camel-mounted reformers from the south, planted their capital here on the plain where the Atlas meets the Sahara routes. They dug the khettara underground channels that still water the Palmeraie, and the city grew rich on gold and salt carried up from Timbuktu.

Standing beneath the Koutoubia minaret, I like to point out that you are looking at the Almohads’ 12th-century answer to the Almoravids — they conquered the city, tore much down and built grander. Later the Saadian sultans of the 16th century made Marrakech glitter with Italian marble and gold, and you feel that most strongly in the Saadian Tombs, sealed up for centuries and only rediscovered in 1917.

The pink-red colour everyone photographs is not paint; it is the local pisé earth the walls and ramparts are built from, glowing at sunset. Under the Alaouite dynasty and their viziers came the grand 19th-century courtyard palaces — the Bahia above all — whose painted cedar ceilings I never tire of showing first-time visitors.

And then there is Jemaa el-Fna, the great square, which UNESCO recognised for its living oral culture of storytellers, musicians and healers. My advice is to arrive there at dusk, when the food stalls light up and the Koutoubia turns gold. Marrakech is nearly a thousand years old, but it has never stopped being a place where the desert comes to trade and to talk.