1.2 million visitors to the Majorelle garden

This is one of the must-see cultural sites during a stay in Marrakech. With its three components – the Jardin Majorelle and the Jardin Majorelle Museum, the Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech Museum and the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Art – the site attracts at least half of all tourists visiting Marrakech. The Jardin Majorelle alone attracted 1.2 million visitors in 2023. Created in the 1930s, Majorelle’s famous garden continues to seduce, captivate, and bewitch visitors. The other museums, created more recently, are doing well. Attendance at the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts reached 404,000 in 2023, while the Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech Museum attracted 411,000 visitors, enough to make the museums, monuments, and other historical and cultural sites of Marrakech and the whole of Morocco green with envy. Winter and summer, weekdays and weekends, tourists flock to this cultural site. The recipe lies in the management of this heritage. When Majorelle bought the land in 1924, it was an arid, windbeaten zone with only a few local palm trees.

In the space of 50 years, the landscape has been completely transformed. Bougainvilleas, bamboos, honeysuckles, agaves, aloes and a wide variety of cacti and palms from all over the world have been planted, giving the garden a unique, peaceful atmosphere. In addition to Majorelle’s imprint, his two purchasers, the late Pierre Bergé and the late Yves Saint Laurent, were responsible for restoring the garden to its former glory. And to ensure continuity, Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent created a foundation to look after this heritage and develop the concept. Thus, in 2011, the gardens had their first Berber museum, and in 2017, the cultural site acquired the Yves Saint Laurent museum in the street that bears the same name as the fashion icon. The Marrakech museum enables visitors to rediscover part of the fashion icon’s collection, including 5,000 garments, 15,000 haute couture accessories, and tens of thousands of sketches and other items still archived in Paris.

Ticket purchase exclusively online

The And still with a view to development, the cultural site has taken a big step towards digital. Tickets for the Jardin Majorelle and the Yves-Saint-Laurent Museum are now sold exclusively online. This choice was made to avoid long queues and free-riders. Recently, the cultural site has been confronted with cases of non-compliant ticket purchases via unauthorized third-party sites, leading to problems for visitors and a negative impact on their experience. «Holders of non-compliant tickets will be denied access to Jardin Majorelle, Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts and Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech Museum», says a statement from Jardins Majorelle.

Badra BERRISSOULE