Bab Agnaou

This guide to Bab Agnaou in Marrakesh explains why a gateway carved with four nested arches and a band of sacred script never had to defend anything: raised around 1188 by the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur as the entrance to his royal Kasbah, it stood safely inside walls he already controlled. You'll hear about the horseshoe arches, carved shells and foliated Kufic script he lavished on it purely to impress, and about the old, unsettled argument over where the gate's name comes from. Look at how the quarried stone has darkened across eight centuries of desert wind.