
La Mamounia hotel review: Marrakesh's grande dame with Moroccan styling and beautiful gardens
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Score 8/10All of Mamounia's elegant bedrooms are pretty spiffy but, if budget allows, it's worth splashing out on a Deluxe room or above for their private balconies (specify one that overlooks the gardens or Koutoubia, rather than the street). All rooms have a crisp, clean feel with arched headboards, mosaic tiling and sepia-tinged photos of Marrakesh that give a real sense of place — even before you open the curtains to see the Atlas Mountains looming in the distance. Marble bathrooms tend towards the compact in lower room categories, and only larger rooms have a bath, while suites come with spacious balconies and opulent lounges. Score 9/10The perennial complaint about Moroccan food — tagine, tagine and more tagine — has no relevance here. Four restaurants dish up almost every cuisine you might fancy, from Jean-Georges Vongerichten's trademark Asian-fusion at L'Asiatique — perhaps dim sum, followed by a Vietnamese curry or musky, miso cod — to pizzas and pasta at L'Italien. Le Marocain, housed in its own riad with three floors overlooking leafy gardens, serves up classic dishes — crispy briouates, salads with the city's signature flavours of orange, almond and preserved lemons — and an elegant breakfast and lunch buffet is laid out in Le Pavillon de la Piscine. It could take all day to to do justice to the spectacular breakfast — fresh patisserie, handmade breads, jams, eggs a dozen different ways — but leave room for afternoon tea, taken beneath shady palms at the Pierre Hermé salon. It's an indulgence not to be missed.
• Discover our full guide to Marrakesh• Best hotels in Marrakesh
Score 9/10If you can raise yourself from a shady hammock (or a lounger by the glittering pool) there's tennis, boules and table tennis, with yoga and Pilates classes and personal training sessions at the gym. Kids of all ages will love the Salle de Jeux — a retro games room with pinball machines, pool tables and board games, while gifts can be picked up at the clutch of small boutiques, selling jewellery, clothes and gifts by local designers and famous names. The spa — where pools shimmer beneath scallop-edged archways and exquisite tilework gleams in flickering candlelight — is one of the city's best. There's a private hammam and, with two of the ten treatment rooms set up for couples, it's a wonderfully romantic retreat.
Score 9/10Many of Marrakesh's luxury hotels are a taxi journey away from the medina. La Mamounia's location, just in front of the city's Koutoubia mosque, is a major plus. The storytellers, snake-charmers and smoke-tinged food stalls of the extraordinary Djemaa el-Fna are just a few minutes' stroll away, with the labyrinthine medina unfolding beyond it. For something a little less hectic, the calmer streets of the Ville Nouvelle are a ten-minute taxi ride away.
Price room-only doubles from £380Restaurant mains from £23Family-friendly YAccessible N
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