Travel Guide Tin-Mal

To climb to Tin-Mal, some 100 km from Marrakech, you need to be patient, as the road winding through the mountains is long and sometimes in poor condition. A few remnants of the ramparts are a reminder that this was once a fortified village. As for the 1148 mosque devastated by the earthquake of September 2023, it was one of the few in Morocco open to non-Muslims. The minaret inspired the Koutoubia in Marrakech, also built by Abd el-Moumen. The Tin-Mal Kasbah may not be the most beautiful, but it's well worth a visit. It was here, 800 years ago, that the Almohad dynasty developed, from Marrakech, to rule all Morocco. Today, Tin-Mal is still revered as the spiritual home of the region. The building, constructed of stone and wood, is of major historical, spiritual and symbolic importance. Renovated with the help of Unesco, it is still the subject of curious legends. It is claimed that it is here, on the very spot where Ibn Toumert was declared the founding father of the Almohad movement, that the sumptuous treasures that the sultans stripped from Marrakech are hidden. In any case, when the Merinids captured Tin-Mal in the 13th century, they plundered the city and desecrated the tombs of the sultans of the Almohad dynasty, either out of revenge or in the secret hope of discovering the spoils.