What are the main architectural styles in Morocco?

Moroccan architecture is one of the great pleasures of a visit, and it helps enormously to know the few families of style you're looking at. The headline tradition is Moorish-Islamic — the shared Hispano-Maghrebi style that Morocco and Muslim Spain developed together. Its vocabulary is unmistakable: the horseshoe (keyhole) arch, intricate 'zellige' mosaic tilework, walls of hand-carved 'gebs' (stucco) and cedar, muqarnas (honeycomb) vaulting, and above all the introverted plan — blank exteriors hiding serene interior courtyards with a central fountain. The Marinid madrasas of Fes and the Saadian Tombs are the masterpieces.

That courtyard logic explains the buildings you'll actually stay and walk in. A 'riad' is a traditional house built around an interior garden courtyard (riad literally means garden), turning its back on the noisy street and opening inward to light, water, and calm — once you grasp this, the whole layout of the medina makes sense. The grand version is the palace, like the Bahia in Marrakech, with its painted ceilings and successive courtyards. The religious version is the mosque-and-minaret, the Almohad Koutoubia being the template that influenced minarets as far as Seville.

Travel south and the material changes completely. The Atlas and pre-Sahara are the land of earthen architecture — 'kasbahs' (fortified houses or castles) and 'ksour' (fortified villages) built of rammed earth and mud-brick, the colour of the ground they rise from, with those tapering towers and geometric incised patterns. Aït Benhaddou, the UNESCO-listed ksar on the old caravan route, is the iconic example and a film-set favourite. This is a different, Berber, desert-adapted tradition — humbler in materials, but breathtaking in form and utterly Moroccan.

Two more layers round it out. In the north — Tetouan, Chefchaouen, Fes — you feel a stronger Andalusian influence from the Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain, who brought their craftsmanship with them. And the 20th century added the French colonial layer: the 'ville nouvelle' boulevards and, most strikingly, Casablanca's superb 1920s–30s Mauresque art deco, which fused European modernism with Moroccan motifs. So a single trip can take you from a 14th-century carved-cedar madrasa to a mud-brick desert kasbah to an art deco cinema — three architectural worlds, all of them genuinely Moroccan.