A Luxury Escape to Marrakech & Royal Mansour

Day 1: Arrive in Marrakech | Royal Mansour

A private transfer from Marrakech Menara Airport brings you to the gates of Royal Mansour in around 15 minutes. The gates open, a butler appears, and the city disappears entirely behind you. Your riad is your own. Three floors, a private courtyard, a rooftop plunge pool with views across the medina rooflines toward the Atlas, and a level of quiet that the medina outside does not prepare you for.

The first evening is for settling in. Dinner at La Grande Table Marocaine, where chef Hélène Darroze has built one of the most considered Moroccan dining experiences in the city, is the right introduction to what the property does at the table. The gardens after dinner, lit and scented and entirely still, are worth the walk.

Days 2–3: Marrakech | Royal Mansour

Two full days to move through the city at whatever pace suits you. The obvious starting point is Jardin Majorelle, the cobalt-blue botanical garden created by French painter Jacques Majorelle and later restored by Yves Saint Laurent.

For LGBTQ+ travelers, it carries an additional resonance: Saint Laurent lived openly in Marrakech for much of his adult life, and the garden and the YSL Museum beside it stand as a lasting, quietly defiant expression of that. Both deserve an unhurried morning.

From there, the medina. The souks around Rahba Lakdima and the Mellah are best explored without a fixed plan and with a private guide, who will open up workshops and ateliers that don’t appear on any map: weavers, silversmiths, leather workers, and spice merchants operating much as they have for centuries.

The Bahia Palace and the Saadian Tombs are ideal for an afternoon visit, when the light shifts and the main sites thin out.

Set aside one afternoon entirely for the Royal Mansour spa, a 2,500-square-meter sanctuary across three floors that is one of the most complete spa experiences in Africa. The hammam circuit, which moves through steam rooms, hot rooms, marble slabs, and a traditional black soap scrub, takes the better part of an afternoon and is worth every minute of it.

The spa’s treatment menu extends to over 80 options, drawing on Moroccan botanicals and techniques that the property has developed in collaboration with leading international houses.

Back at the hotel, the question of where to eat is a good one to have. Sesamo, the Italian restaurant helmed by three-Michelin-starred chef Massimiliano Alajmo, makes a compelling case for staying in. So does Le Jardin, the terrace restaurant set among the lush hotel gardens, which serves some of the best fresh seafood in Marrakech. The rooftop of your own riad, with a glass of something cold and the city spread below, is always another option.

Day 4: High Atlas Day Excursion

A private car heads south from Marrakech through the Oukaimeden foothills toward the High Atlas. The shift in landscape is quick and striking: the ochre plains give way to mountain villages, terraced valleys, and the rising peaks of the Atlas range, with Mount Toubkal, the highest point in North Africa at 4,167 meters, visible on a clear day from the road.

The excursion takes in the Asni valley and the Berber villages of the Ourika valley, where a private guide opens up the daily rhythms of mountain life in a way that a self-guided visit cannot. Lunch is at one of the valley’s better small restaurants, where the tagines are cooked over charcoal, and the setting is the High Atlas itself. The drive back to Marrakech in the late afternoon light, with the city reappearing below on the plain, is its own kind of pleasure.

Return to Royal Mansour for the evening. After a day in the mountains, the private courtyard and the plunge pool and the quiet of your own riad are exactly what’s needed.

Day 5: Marrakech at Your Own Pace | Royal Mansour

The fifth day is deliberately unscheduled. Marrakech at its own pace, without a program, is a different city from the one you tour. Sleep late. Have breakfast on the riad rooftop. Revisit a souk that caught your attention earlier in the week. Commission something from a craftsman whose work you admired. Spend the afternoon in the hotel gardens with a book. Book the private hammam suite at the Royal Mansour spa for a session that doesn’t share a schedule with anyone else.

For the final dinner, La Grande Table Marocaine is worth returning to for a longer, more celebratory meal. The private dining experience, available on request, offers a completely exclusive table within the hotel’s grounds: the most considered way to close out five days in one of the world’s great hotels.

Day 6: Depart Marrakech

A final morning in the riad before a private transfer to Marrakech Menara Airport. There is a version of this day that involves an early walk through the medina before the souks fully open, when the lanes are quiet and the light is at its best. The Royal Mansour team can arrange whatever you need. The city will be there when you come back.