El Badi Palace

This guide to El Badi Palace in Marrakesh opens with a court jester who, asked to praise the sultan's brand-new palace, predicted instead that it would one day make a fine ruin. It traces Ahmad al-Mansur's victory over a Portuguese invasion, the ransom money that funded these three hundred sixty rooms, and the vast sunken courtyard built to overawe visiting ambassadors. Look for the twelfth-century minbar from the Koutoubia Mosque, still kept somewhere among these walls.