The Almoravid Koubba in Marrakech: the city's oldest building, buried and rediscovered

A few metres from the Ben Youssef Mosque and the Museum of Marrakech, in the heart of the Medina, there is a small structure of stone and brick that almost no one enters. It is called the Almoravid Koubba, or Qubbat al-Barudiyyin, and it holds a surprising distinction: it is the oldest building in Marrakech and the only surviving Almoravid architecture in the city. All the rest of that dynasty, which founded the city around 1070, was razed to the ground by the Almohads who took power in the mid-twelfth century. This pavilion, somehow, remained standing.

History and function

It was built by the Almoravid ruler Ali ibn Yusuf at the beginning of the twelfth century. The inner inscription gives the precise day but the year is illegible: the most likely dates are 1117 or 1125. It was neither a place of worship nor a mausoleum, as the word "koubba" (dome) might suggest. It was a pavilion for ritual ablutions, the mida'a, connected to the nearby mosque: the faithful washed there before prayer. Beneath the dome is a basin of water, and all around it worked a refined hydraulic system, with bronze pipes bringing water from a vaulted cistern, probably fed by the khettaras, the underground channels that have irrigated the region for centuries. There were also latrines and a monumental fountain opening onto the street.

Buried and rediscovered

The reason it goes unnoticed is literal: for centuries it lay buried. When French scholars documented it, between 1947 and 1948, more than half the structure was under seven or eight metres of debris accumulated over the centuries. The proper excavations, carried out in the following years by Henri Terrasse and Jacques Meunié, brought it back to light. This is why today you do not look at it from above like any other monument: you go down to it, by two flights of stairs, to the level at which the ground stood in Almoravid times. You have the physical sensation of entering another stratum of the city.

The decorated dome

What you see inside is worth the descent. The dome is a small masterpiece: the carved decoration plays with pine cones, palms, acanthus leaves, shells and calligraphy. In the corners are four small domes with some of the earliest examples of muqarnas, the honeycomb niches, in all of Morocco. The inscription in cursive Kufic characters that runs along the interior and this decorative vocabulary are not a detail for specialists: they are the root from which all Moroccan architecture of the following centuries grew, from the medersas to the mosques that crowd today's itineraries. Scholars note echoes of the Great Mosque of Córdoba and of Abbasid art, a sign of a Morocco already then connected to the rest of the Islamic world.

How to get there

Getting there is easy, and this is precisely what makes it strange that it is so little visited: it is in Place Ben Youssef, the same open space as the Museum of Marrakech and the medersa, in the northern part of the Medina, reachable on foot from Jemaa el-Fna square in about twenty minutes through the alleys of the souk. The structure is twelve metres high and rests on a rectangular plan of about seven metres by five: small, it can be visited in a quarter of an hour. It is worth combining it with the Ben Youssef medersa and the museum, which are right next to it. The opening hours change over time, so it is best to check them on site or at the museum before planning the visit.

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