Park Arsat Moulay Abdesalam

This guide to Park Arsat Moulay Abdesalam in Marrakesh opens in the 1700s, when Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah gave the walled garden to his son, Prince Moulay Abdeslam, as a wedding gift. It follows the prince, a poet and scholar who governed Souss, as he laid out orchards and shaded walkways behind the medina's walls, and traces the garden's long decline once no one was left to tend it. By the end of the twentieth century, with no single authority tending it, locals were kicking footballs across its untended beds.