Alexander|La Mamounia, Marrakech — Babylon behind a garden wall

The gate on Avenue Bab Jdid gives nothing away. You pass through, and the noise of Marrakech simply stops. What opens up is roughly seventeen acres of walled garden — olive trees that were old before the hotel existed, orange and lemon rows planted in straight military lines, water channels running between them because that is how a Moroccan garden has always been cooled. Oliver Stone filmed Alexander's palace grounds here. When the young king walks his conquered paradise, he is walking someone's eighteenth-century wedding present.

That is the real history of the place. The land was a gift from Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah to his son, Prince Al Mamoun, and the prince's name stayed on it long after the orchard became a hotel in 1923. Stone needed Babylon to feel inherited rather than built — a garden with the weight of generations in it, not a set dressed that morning. He found it about four hundred metres inside the medina walls.

Come in the morning, before the heat flattens everything. Walk to the far end of the olive grove and turn back toward the buildings, and you will see the Koutoubia minaret over the wall and, on a clear winter day, the snow line of the High Atlas beyond it. Churchill set an easel up in these grounds more than once for exactly that view. The gardens are open to hotel guests and to anyone with a booking at the restaurants or the tea salon, which is worth knowing before you arrive expecting to wander in.

Stand under the oldest olives and the trick of the film becomes obvious. Nothing here was dressed to look ancient. It simply is.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.