What is the history of the Glaoui, the pashas of Marrakech?

The Glaoui story is the one I tell as we drive the Tichka pass, because it begins right there in the High Atlas. The family controlled the Telouet kasbah commanding a key mountain route, and a stroke of luck in the 1890s — a sultan’s army stranded by snow was rescued and rewarded by them, gaining modern artillery — let them dominate the tribes of the south.

Thami El Glaoui rose from that base to become Pasha of Marrakech in 1912, just as the French protectorate began. He chose to ally with the French, and in return they let him rule the south almost as a private kingdom. He grew fabulously wealthy from land, mines and, less proudly, from controlling vice in the city, and he entertained Churchill and Hollywood stars with legendary lavishness.

You can still feel the scale of his power in two ruins I love taking guests to: the crumbling, gorgeously decaying Telouet kasbah in the mountains, with its astonishing painted and tiled state rooms, and the Glaoui apartments’ echoes in Marrakech. They are monuments to a man who was, for a time, effectively the most powerful Moroccan after the sultan himself.

His ending was sudden. In 1953 the Glaoui helped the French depose the nationalist Sultan Mohammed V, a deeply unpopular act. When the sultan returned in triumph in 1955, the tide turned completely; Thami publicly begged forgiveness and died, broken and disgraced, in early 1956, the very year of independence. I find it a sobering lesson in how quickly a collaborator’s power can collapse — and Telouet is all the more haunting for it.