Riad fever

MARRAKECH has long lured western travellers. “The days are perfect, the nights are cool,” Winston Churchill noted in his war memoirs (he was a regular guest at the city's La Mamounia hotel). In the 1960s, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards lived it up at Hotel Es Saadi, and Yves Saint Laurent bought his first dar (Moroccan house), flying from Paris between collections. But it is only since the late 1990s that significant numbers of westerners have started to flock to the city's 12th-century, pink-walled medina. Some come for a holiday; others choose to settle here. What has attracted them? For a large number, it is the courtyard houses built around gardens—riads.