Maison de la Photographie

The Maison de la Photographie is a small, essential museum in the northern medina that houses a collection of over 10,000 photographs, glass negatives, and postcards documenting Morocco from the 1870s to the 1960s — a visual record of a country transitioning from traditional kingdom through colonial protectorate to modern nation. The museum occupies a restored riad (traditional courtyard house) whose cool, tiled rooms provide the ideal setting for prints that are themselves studies in light and shadow.

The photographs show a Morocco that has largely disappeared — Berber villages, desert caravans, Jewish communities, French colonial officials, the Jemaa el-Fna before cars and electricity, and the everyday life of Moroccans whose world was changing faster than they could document it. The images are displayed chronologically, and walking through the galleries is like watching a time-lapse of modernisation — traditional dress gives way to Western clothing, donkeys are replaced by cars, and the medina's open spaces gradually fill with the buildings that now occupy them.

The rooftop café, accessible from the museum's top floor, provides one of the best panoramic views of the medina — the Koutoubia minaret, the Ben Youssef Mosque, and the rooftop terrace landscape of riads and satellite dishes that is the medina's secret skyline. The museum is privately run, charges a modest admission fee, and is consistently praised as one of the best small museums in Morocco. It's the kind of discovery that makes walking the medina's side streets rewarding — you turn a corner, find a doorway, and inside is a collection that reframes everything you've seen outside.