The first thing to know about Marrakesh to visit a week after New Year’s. The weather is still great but the city is much less crowded (just like Venice, but there you’ll need an overcoat). On this trip our great discovery was Berber Lodge, which is a thirty minute drive into the desert. I wrote about the visit for Air Mail (along with some Marrakesh recommendations, including the decadent Royal Mansour and the charming Riad Mena).
Berber Lodge is the antidote for what’s exhausting with modern travel. The breathless social media driven sceney-ness of it all (if sceney-ness isn’t a word it should be). I imagine we’ve all had the experience where it seems like everybody we know and everybody we don’t know is at the same hotel, same stretch of Italian Riviera or same island in Greece.
Berber Lodge, by contrast, is calm. It’s like arriving at an open stretch of road in a world full of traffic. The lodge is a series of beautifully designed adobe buildings and the focus is on relaxation and simple pleasures. What should be a straightforward equation—isn’t this what hotels should be like?—felt almost exotic.
There’s a large pool (unheated, as it happens) and you lounge in the shade of handsome olive trees. Lunch is served on an attractive lawn at wooden tables beneath large umbrellas. The meal is set, like all meals here, with a salad from their garden and a main course that’s from the grill. The food is good but not overly precious. There’s a little hammam, a few activities can be arranged if you’re dying for action. We just walked in the desert as the sun set and the light was soft behind the Atlas Mountains.