Mamounia: Morocco’s Legendary Hotel Where World Leaders and Diplomacy Flourished

In the 18th century, Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah had offered an eight-hectare estate composed of orange groves, olive trees, fountains, gardens, and alleys as a wedding gift to his fourth son, Prince Mamoun. This would later become the Mamounia. A legendary hotel that owes its name to Prince Mamoun. The palace was built in 1923. At the time, Morocco was under French protectorate. With around fifty rooms, the hotel began to receive a few travelers. Winston Churchill, the former British Prime Minister, made several long stays there between the 1930s and 1950s. He even made it his preferred painting studio.

"Out of love for the Mamounia, unable to resist its attraction, he even managed to convince Roosevelt to accompany him after the Casablanca conference" between the Allies, in 1943, in the midst of World War II, for a 48-hour getaway, writes André Paccard, the official architect of Hassan II, in his book Mamounia, Marrakech, Maroc. After the war, the hotel established itself as one of the best in the world. Several renovations have been undertaken. From the most opulent styles of French art to Arab-Moorish art, the hotel exudes luxury, modernity, and fascination. The era of King Hassan II gave rise to what would later be called "the diplomacy of the Mamounia".

The sovereign received the French elite there. "I also noticed how close the complicity between Hassan II and the French political elite was. It’s thanks to the Mamounia. Newspaper and magazine editors, like Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Observateur or Jacques Amalric of Le Monde, came to Morocco on the king’s planes to conduct interviews with him. In short, around the Mamounia pool, there was the cream of the left and the cream of the right," describes Gilles Perrault, author of Notre ami le Roi, in an interview with Orient XXI. For the sovereign, "it is also a matter of eavesdropping and secretly recording the escapades of French politicians of all stripes," according to La Libre.be.

"How many French ministers have stayed for free in Moroccan palaces for years, under the pretext of a three-day work visit starting on Friday, with a half-hour official meeting to justify it all?" a Quai d’Orsay connoisseur had confided to Le Monde in February 2011. "On Morocco, we are embarrassed: they ’hold’ us," another source assured, still in Le Monde. Some "affairs" do not escape the media: the accusations against a French minister in residence at the Mamounia, or "the famous quarrel of Philippe Douste-Blazy, then French Minister of Foreign Affairs, with his wife in the corridors of the palace in March 2006, which earned him to hear the opposition deputies whisper ’Mamounia! Mamounia!’ as he passed through the Assembly."

With the advent of François Hollande, the diplomacy of the Mamounia has struggled to maintain the same momentum. The same observation has been made since the beginning of the first term of his successor Emmanuel Macron. "This diplomacy no longer works with Macron. If the current president wants to visit Morocco, he will do so at his own expense. It’s a generational issue. This Moroccan diplomacy of hospitality is less effective today and those who succumb to it are on the way out, like Jack Lang," assures Christian Chenot, in an interview with the Moroccan weekly TelQuel, following the publication of his book Le déclassement français, in March 2022.

King Mohammed VI breaks with the tradition established by his late father, preferring to receive the press and his distinguished guests at home, in his various palaces and at the Royal Mansour, a competing palace of the Mamounia, whose construction he ordered. Today, it is the stars who continue to be seen at the Mamounia. Politicians are more discreet.