Jardin Majorelle & Yves Saint Laurent Museum

Jardin Majorelle is the most famous garden in Morocco — a 1-hectare Art Deco botanical garden created by French painter Jacques Majorelle over 40 years beginning in 1923, rescued from development by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in 1980, and now the most visited attraction in Marrakech after Jemaa el-Fna. The garden's signature is Majorelle Blue — a vivid cobalt colour used on the buildings, pots, and structures throughout the garden that Majorelle developed specifically for this site and that has become as associated with Marrakech as the red of the medina walls.

The garden is a dense, lush collection of cacti, bougainvillea, bamboo, palms, and the tropical plants that Majorelle collected from five continents, arranged around reflecting pools and pathways that create a sense of walking through a painting. The studio building, painted in Majorelle Blue with yellow accents, houses the Berber Museum, which displays a collection of North African textiles, jewellery, and costumes that Yves Saint Laurent and Bergé assembled over decades.

The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, opened in 2017 in a purpose-built terracotta building adjacent to the garden, displays the designer's haute couture work in rotating exhibitions that demonstrate why Saint Laurent considered Marrakech his spiritual home. The building, designed by Studio KO, uses brick in patterns inspired by the warp and weft of fabric, and the interior spaces — austere, precisely lit, and climate-controlled — provide museum-quality conditions for the delicate garments. The garden and museum together represent the intersection of French fashion, Moroccan craft, and botanical art that has made Marrakech a creative destination since the 1960s.