El Badi Palace

In 1578, fresh from his victory at the Battle of the Three Kings, the Saadian sultan Ahmad al-Mansur set out to build a palace that would announce Morocco's new power to the world. He called it El Badi — "the Incomparable" — and for roughly twenty-five years, caravans crossed the Sahara carrying gold from Timbuktu while Italian merchants shipped Carrara marble to Marrakech in exchange for Moroccan sugar. When it was finished, El Badi held some 360 rooms arranged around a vast courtyard measuring 135 by 110 metres, its sunken orange gardens framing a reflecting pool nearly 90 metres long.

The palace's glory did not last. Barely a century after it was completed, Sultan Moulay Ismail ordered it stripped bare to build his new capital at Meknes — marble, cedar beams, gold leaf, and tilework were carted north piece by piece, leaving behind the roofless pisé walls that stand today. What remains is less a monument to Saadian wealth than to its undoing: a vast, sun-bleached ruin where white storks now nest on the ramparts, and where, inside a small pavilion, the exquisite 12th-century Koutoubia minbar survives as a reminder of just how much finer craftsmanship once filled these walls.