Bab Debbagh

This guide to Bab Debbagh in Marrakesh traces the gate back nearly nine hundred years to the Almoravid ruler Ali ibn Yusuf, who raised the city's first walls around 1126, and to the Almohads who later reshaped the passage into its five-bend, S-shaped route. You'll hear why a gate designed to slow attackers down mattered as much as one built to keep them out, and how the tanning quarter just beyond it has worked leather on the same ground since the Almoravid period. Notice the smell that greets you before you even reach the arch.