สถานที่ตลาดซูกมาร์ราเกชThe Marrakesh soukأسواق مراكش

Marrakesh was founded in 1070. Its two focal points were the Ksar el-Hajjar, the fortress of stone, and the first Friday mosque; the souk streets grew along the roads between them and have kept that line ever since. At the fortress end lay a large open space for temporary and weekly markets, called Rahbat al-Ksar, then as-Saha al-Kubra, the grand square. That space is today's Jemaa el-Fnaa, and the souk is edged along one side by it.

What the square sells changes by the hour. By day: orange juice, water sellers with leather bags and brass cups, snake charmers. Later the charmers leave and the square fills with storytellers, musicians, magicians and peddlers of traditional medicines; after dark, food stalls. UNESCO's programme for intangible heritage began with people worried about exactly this square, and the label followed.

The written trade is documented across the region rather than lane by lane. The scholar Remke Kruk found books on magic and sorcery well represented in street stalls and bookshops from Marrakesh to Cairo to Yemen around 2005; from about 1990 religious pamphlets condemning those practices sold beside them.

Inference — the herbalists' stalls are what most visitors come away describing, and this atlas has not yet read a source it can cite for them. The record therefore names the square's medicine peddlers, which is published, and stops there rather than furnishing the lanes from guidebooks it could not open.

Trading. The square went into a renovation programme from May 2025, budgeted at 160 million dirhams and scheduled to finish by the end of that year, to rework infrastructure and reorganise the public and commercial space. Hours are the stallholders' own; none are marked below.