La Mamounia

About the hotel

Set inside 200-year-old royal gardens gifted by a sultan to his son, La Mamounia opened as a hotel in 1923 and became the twentieth century's definitive escape: art deco layered over Moorish craft, with the Atlas Mountains standing behind the olive groves. Winston Churchill wintered here through the 1930s–50s, painting in the gardens he declared the loveliest place on earth.

Successive renovations — most famously Jacques Garcia's 2009 reinvention — have kept it at the top of the "world's best hotel" lists it seems to permanently inhabit.

Suites & dining

The Churchill Suite keeps the great man's memory (and cigar-friendly terrace); the three private riads inside the gardens are Marrakech's most secluded address. Pierre Hermé runs the pâtisserie, and the bar named for Churchill pours under portraits of him; dinner in the gardens among 700-year-old olive trees is the signature.

The celebrity connection

Alfred Hitchcock shot "The Man Who Knew Too Much" here in 1956, putting the hotel on screen opposite James Stewart and Doris Day. The Rolling Stones, Yves Saint Laurent and Paul McCartney made it rock-and-fashion royalty's Marrakech base; today it hosts the Marrakech Film Festival's A-list and the fashion houses that show in the medina.