'Saint Tropez Minus the Yachts': Marrakesh's Troubling Transformation into Luxury Hot Spot

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A few hundred kilometers south of Marrakesh, al-Qaida sympathizers are hatching sinister plans.

After 9/11, the CIA used Moroccan jails to torture prisoners, and Moroccan officials claim to have thwarted roughly 50 attacks planned by radical Islamists since the suicide bombings in Casablanca seven years ago. The police are omnipresent, officials from the Ministry of Religious Affairs keep a close eye on the imams in the mosques, and the press has been put on a tight leash.

Between the date palms along the road to Amizmiz, which leads from Marrakesh into the Atlas Mountains, there are signs every hundred meters or so advertising gated communities -- with their guards, high walls and armed checkpoints.

Realtor Oliver Kirner, 46, stands in front of 20-square-meter scale model of such a complex dotted with 740 dark-blue pins. Each pin represents one of the 590 swimming pools for the 590 villas to be built on the clay soil in three construction phases as well as another 150 for hotel suites. That's a lot of water for a country that is mostly covered by desert.

Kirner is originally from Freiburg, a university city in the southwest corner of Germany. He has short gray hair and wears a dark-blue jacket and cravat. In the late '90s, he opened one of the first real estate companies in Marrakesh. When the rush on property began, in 2000 and 2001, it was primarily French people who came to snap up small riads -- traditional Moroccan houses with interior gardens -- in the Old Town. At the time, he was selling two to three houses a week. Since then, house prices have risen tenfold. "We hit the jackpot," he says.

These days, Kirner is mostly selling villas with small pools out front that are part of a development -- dubbed the Samanah Country Club -- owned by a group of French realtors. An advertising flyer proclaims that it will be the new Santa Barbara of Morocco, complete with an artificial village, a daily market and 24-hour services for residents -- including catering, babysitting, massage, housekeeping and gardening.

The centerpiece of the 300-hectare development is an 18-hole golf course with a view of the Atlas Mountains. To build it, 300 truckloads of white sand were driven down from Bordeaux, France. The cacti were flown in from Mexico. Two-thirds of the completed villas have already been sold -- to Indians, Russians, Saudis, French and Moroccans.

Kirner says the rich and famous like Marrakesh because it's so easy to manage their networks from there. "No one can resist the offer to fly down to meet with business partners for a few days," he says. After all, he adds, everyone else is already here in this small, exclusive millionaires' club. It's the Saint Tropez principle -- minus just the yachts.

The Darker Side of Paradise

Still, this transformation has had a strong effect on average Moroccans. For example, the boom has sent real estate prices into orbit. Since the average middle-class family earns just under €400 ($560) a month -- and the majority of the population has to get by on far less -- most Moroccans can now only afford to live on the outskirts of the city.

Within the space of just a few years, the king's policies have modernized Morocco and Moroccan society -- but with the usual consequences. For example, there has been a rise in the number of illegitimate children, which is something still considered disgraceful in an Islamic country.

Directly behind the Mamounia's expansive gardens, there is a state-run hospital, a dilapidated, boxy building filled with old iron beds. For a few years now, there have been two different rooms for newborn babies. One is for babies born into "normal" families; the other for the children of young, unmarried women who have their babies in secret and then give them away right after birth.

There are also sordid tales of Arab sheikhs who rent villas in the Palmeraie for a weekend to spend time with 30 young Moroccan men and women. And there are others of Europeans who go there to film and photograph children and youths for pornographic Web sites. Claims such as these prompted the police in Marrakesh to set up a special anti-pedophilia division a few years ago, which now regularly arrests suspected foreign child abusers.

Culture Clash

The soirée at the Mamounia ends at about 3 a.m. Star architect Jacques Garcia spent a long time at the bar. His renovation of the building took three years. In the process, he repositioned nearly all the walls, created new patios and "in architectural terms, combined the Orient with the Occident." In other words, he installed iPod stations, wireless LAN networks and flatscreen TVs.

Brian Ferry sits in the Italian restaurant and wonders whether the new Marrakesh will be too modern. Orlando Bloom talks about his Moroccan dog, and the evening closes with Carine Roitfeld, the editor of the French edition of Vogue, singing a karaoke duet with former Gucci designer Matthew Williamson in the hotel's Churchill Bar.

At 4:35 a.m., the muezzin from the nearby Koutoubia mosque wakes up most of the hotel guests with a 15-minute call to prayer amplified by loudspeakers. It's very loud and very authentic.

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• Part 1: Marrakesh's Troubling Transformation into Luxury Hot Spot
• Part 2: Saint Tropez Minus the Yachts
• Part 3: The 'Santa Barbara of Morocco'