Artists love Marrakech for its painterly palette but the city is also a potted history of chic tourism, says Chris Waywell

High above us, the road winds up and up. Cars look like grains of couscous; trucks like grains of couscous pulling grains of rice. Snow, goats, donkeys and Berber women cling to the mountainsides. Around every bend there might be an impromptu souk (market) of animals spilling across the road, the men staring down the tourists in our fancy four-by-fours. They favour open Toyota pick-ups, the pointy-hooded djellebahs of the occupants making them look like they are packed with Christmas trees.

We are on the way to Kasbah Telouet, the mountain stronghold of the Glaoui clan, which is three hours’ drive south of Marrakech. In the summer, this is a popular trip out of town. In the winter there are fewer coaches – but just as many hazards to negotiate. The French Foreign Legion constructed the road in the 30s, as they sought to extend colonial rule over Morocco’s hinterland. Telouet, armed, dangerous, some 7,000ft above sea level and run by an anti-French fanatic, Hammou, was considered a sufficient threat for the road builders to detour round it. Yet, only 25 years later, it was abandoned – and when we finally arrive we find a picturesque semi-ruin undergoing a piecemeal restoration. Superbly carved ceilings sag, tiled walls bulge and birds sit and shit on the green-glazed roof. In the background the mountains are still and unperturbed. A Berber lad called Omar shows us round, then shares a lunch of bread, cheese and mint tea with us. Progress seems to have stalled here – in a good way. The kasbah (palace) is gently crumbling back into the soil. Another chapter of Morocco’s history is closing.

Marrakech has always had a certain glamourous cachet. When Winston Churchill visited Telouet in the 30s it was at the invitation of Hammou’s uncle, Thami El Glaoui, ‘Lord of the Atlas’: a tribal warlord installed by the French to run Marrakech. The city already held a fascination for Europeans and El Glaoui played up to his role as a mysterious Berber chieftain in between rounds of golf on his lavishly appointed and well-watered links. Churchill came to Marrakech to relax, write and paint; the last was something he later encouraged Thami El Glaoui’s son Hassan to pursue. An exhibition currently at Leighton House in London hangs the two artists’ works side by side. Hassan, who went on to be one of Morocco’s most respected artists, is very obviously the natural painter: his canvases glow with the rich earthy pigments of the area. You see the same duns and ochres in the walls of Kasbah Telouet and there is still a bylaw in Marrakech that all buildings should be painted a pinkish-orange colour. Churchill’s works are stiffer: by his own admission he was a ‘Sunday painter’, yet what is most remarkable about the show is how familiar the subject matter of both artists is today. Okay, Hassan is still with us, but even his early gouaches from the 40s show scenes and people that you will find in today’s Medina (the old city): the caleches (carriages) on Jemaa El Fna, the square that is the pulsing heart of the city; water-sellers and Berber women hawking jewellery and textiles; endless palm trees (some of them now mobile phone masts in disguise) and the ever-visible tower of the Koutoubia Mosque. All of it suffused with the astonishingly clear and immediately recognisable light of the city.

This ‘local colour’ has remained the one constant as ideas about what is charming or chic in Marrakech have changed over the years. Churchill might have found plenty of subject matter here but he had reservations: “Although the native city is full of attractive spots, the crowds, the smells and the general discomfort have repelled me,” he wrote to his wife in the 30s. Luckily for the city – and the modern visitor – this ‘discomfort’ has not been entirely eradicated. Despite a clampdown on the most aggressive hawkers by the tourist police, the souks are still a largely unmoderated free-for-all. Chickens are butchered in the street and a woman with a bandaged nose wishes us ‘bonsoir’ as she squats to piss near the entrance to our riad (splendid courtyarded townhouse). The olfactory GBH of the egg market on a hot day remains a terrible memory. Jemaa El Fna is a riot round the clock: crowds gather around storytellers and a whole brigade of hot-food vendors set up and take down their stalls every night. There’s no shortage of crap for tourists: grumpy monkeys to be snapped with and henna tattooists that are the stuff of tabloid xenophobia – but this is mostly window-dressing. The Medina works to its own needs and, though full-on, is generally good-natured and very safe.

The explosion of riads in the last decade has made these the norm when it comes to choosing decent accommodation and has ensured Marrakech a steady supply of tourist dirhams (cash). Churchill preferred the cloistered precincts of La Mamounia (Ave Bab Jedid; +212 524 388 600/www.mamounia.com): for decades Marrakech’s poshest destination hotel. It’s still going strong, though after a recent revamp has lost much of its colonial character and stands in part as a reminder of an era when the personal touch was not high up a list of hotel’s priorities. Now its snooty airs seem an anachronism: like furs and titles, there’s something faintly embarrassing about them. The gardens are still worth visiting, though they won’t let you in without a table reservation. Instead, visit the Majorelle Gardens (Ave Yacoub El Mansour), surrounding a villa owned by the late Yves Saint Laurent. They evoke the jet-set Marrakech and are open to all (often too many): dense planting, delicate pools and shaded paths create a tranquil haven, while ‘Majorelle Blue’ has established itself firmly on the Moroccan palette.

Our taste for 60s glamour piqued, we decamp to Marrakech’s other hospitality institution, Es Saadi (Rue Ibrahim El Manzini; +212 24 44 88 11/www.essaadi.com). Morocco’s first casino when it opened in 1952, Es Saadi is still run by the same family and offers a glimpse of the playground of the beau monde of the era. Churchill came here to gamble, they gave Charles Aznavour his first residency and the Stones famously stayed in the hotel. “They were on the fifth floor and we put no-one on the fourth,” said Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhal, daughter of Es Saadi’s founder. With its cocktails and Dunhill fags behind the bar, the place has a Graham Greene-ish air about it, though it’s also home to the city’s hippest club, Theatro. It’s a reminder that the Medina, with its souks and smells and omnipresent motorbikes millimetres from disaster, is not everyone’s idea of a romantic idyll. Chic Moroccans and many visitors never set foot in the Medina and Es Saadi was full of badly-dressed but evidently well-off Russians who didn’t look like they were about to haggle over a pair of pointy yellow leather slippers any time soon.

The ‘historic’ in Marrakech is often packaged to visitors through its markets, palaces, mosques and museums, and these do offer compelling reasons to visit. Equally, the light and the landscape captivated both Churchill and Hassan El Glaoui – both powerful men from very different backgrounds who were happy to find inspiration in a culture that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. But the ongoing story of Marrakech is just as engaging – and the way it has been interpreted over the last century through different ideas of travel, tourism, cachet and cool – has a lot to reveal about our attitudes to the ‘foreign’, especially if it’s right on our doorstep. It may have a film festival and an art biennale now but the heart of the place remains at a more elemental level: in its light and earth and water, and the importance they hold for its population scratching a living.

“People say ‘oh, Marrakech has changed, it’s not the same,’ Bauchet-Bouhal tells us, “but why should it be? It’s like different generations: a grandmother, mother and daughter.”