“The taxi driver's air freshener — a plastic strawberry dangling from the mirror — smells more like cinnamon than anything strawberry, and somehow that's the first thing that feels like Marrakech.”

The cab from Marrakech Menara airport takes the Route de Fès before veering north toward the Palmeraie, and the city peels away in stages. First the roundabouts choked with scooters and petit taxis. Then the long boulevard lined with half-finished apartment blocks and tyre shops. Then, abruptly, date palms. Hundreds of them, lining both sides of the road in dusty rows, their trunks whitewashed at the base like someone started painting a fence and gave up. The driver doesn't use the meter — you agree on 16 USD before getting in or you'll regret it — and he takes a shortcut through a residential zone where kids are kicking a ball against a wall the colour of dried apricot. Zone de Zahrat Annakhil doesn't announce itself. There's no grand gate, no landmark. The hotel entrance appears between two other resort entrances, all of them accessed from the same featureless road. You could miss it. You probably will, the first time.

Check-in involves mint tea in a glass so small it feels ceremonial, which it is. The lobby is wide and tiled and cooler than the parking lot by at least ten degrees. There's a faint smell of orange blossom that might be piped in or might just be the trees outside — I never figured out which. A staff member walks you to the room through a garden path that loops past the main pool, where a dozen people are already horizontal on sun loungers at eleven in the morning, drinks in hand. The all-inclusive wristband goes on. The holiday math begins: how many poolside cocktails justify the nightly rate.

The room, the pool, the quiet

The standard double room is exactly what you need and nothing you'll photograph for Instagram. Neutral walls, a firm bed with white linens, a flat-screen TV tuned to a French news channel. The air conditioning works immediately and aggressively — you'll reach for the remote within twenty minutes to dial it back. There's a balcony with two plastic chairs and a view of the garden, which in practice means you're looking at a hedge and, beyond it, the tops of palm trees. Morning light comes in soft and amber through the curtains. The bathroom has a walk-in shower with decent pressure and a small collection of toiletries in unmarked bottles that smell like generic hotel lavender. The safe works. The minibar is stocked as part of the all-inclusive, which means you'll find small bottles of water and local soft drinks replenished daily.

What defines this place isn't the room — it's the particular rhythm of an adults-only all-inclusive in a city most people visit for chaos. The medina, with its souks and snake charmers and relentless salesmanship, is a twenty-minute cab ride south. Here, the loudest sound at two in the afternoon is someone ordering a Casablanca beer at the pool bar. There's a strange tension between the two Marrakechs: the one you came to see and the one you retreat to. The hotel leans hard into the retreat. Multiple restaurants rotate themed buffet nights — Moroccan, Italian, something loosely described as international — and the food is fine. Tagine night is the one to catch. The lamb is slow-cooked and genuinely good, served with preserved lemons that have the right amount of salt and funk.

The honest thing: the Palmeraie is isolated. If you want to walk somewhere — a café, a shop, a pharmacy — you're out of luck. There's nothing within comfortable walking distance except other resorts. You're dependent on taxis or the hotel's shuttle service, which runs to Jemaa el-Fnaa on a schedule that requires some planning. I missed it once and spent 12 USD on a cab back. The WiFi holds up in the lobby and common areas but gets temperamental in the rooms after dark, which might be a feature depending on your relationship with your phone.

“The medina is a twenty-minute cab ride and an entire world away — which is either the problem or the point, depending on the kind of trip you're having.”

One morning I sat on the balcony before breakfast and watched a gardener methodically water every plant in the courtyard below with a green hose, moving with the patience of someone who has done this exact thing every day for years. He talked to the plants. Not in a whimsical way — more like giving instructions. I couldn't hear the words. A cat sat on the path ahead of him and refused to move, and he watered around it. This had no bearing on my stay. I think about it constantly.

The pool is the social centre, ringed with loungers and shaded cabanas. By mid-afternoon, the animation team starts gentle activities — water aerobics, trivia — that you can ignore without guilt. Couples dominate, mostly European, mostly quiet. The spa offers hammam treatments starting around 43 USD, and the one I tried involved being scrubbed with a kessa glove by a woman who was clearly unimpressed by my skin-care routine. She was right to be. There's also a smaller, quieter pool near the back of the property that fewer guests seem to know about, tucked behind the tennis court. That's the one.

Walking out

On the last morning, the cab back to the airport takes the same road in reverse. The palm groves thin out. The scooters reappear. A man on the corner of Avenue Mohammed VI is grilling corn over charcoal at seven in the morning, the smoke drifting across three lanes of traffic. The city is already loud, already moving, already itself. The Palmeraie quiet already feels like something I borrowed rather than something I lived in. If you take the hotel shuttle to the medina, ask the driver to drop you at Bab Doukkala rather than Jemaa el-Fnaa — it's a ten-minute walk through actual residential streets, past a bakery called Boulangerie Hind where a msemen costs 0 USD and tastes like it was made thirty seconds ago. It was.

Standard double rooms at Be Live Collection Marrakech start around 129 USD per night for two, all-inclusive — which means your meals, drinks, pool access, and that second cocktail you didn't plan on are already covered. For the Palmeraie, where everything else requires a taxi, that math works in the hotel's favour.