Come a confession for this travel magazine: It's getting harder and harder for me to travel. I don't know very well what is happening to me or why; I do not know if this anxiety that sometimes appears in my day to day (today, without going any further) like a distant shadow, if it is a matter of such barren urgency or of this diaspora of commitments and rewards. Added to this feeling of tiredness —that the world weighs— all the debts of the traveling planet: boarding gates, queues with masks, nobody's time. If these tolls were already heavy in the world before, now they are dikes, molten lead at the feet. Why move from home? Why so much effort? That is precisely why we decided to go back to The Mamounia.
That is why, I suppose, it is only worth traveling when what awaits you is transcendence, that is why in this pause in the world I think that we are all doing a bit the same: rearm ranks, prioritize desires, prioritize time (now I understand the infinite value of time: it is all we have). That's why, I guess, I'm rethinking everything, also the exits, especially the exits —because I don't want to travel to escape, but to find myself: travel to be and not just to be. Whether it's memorable or not. That is precisely why we decided to go back to The Mamounia , because in few places have I felt (I have felt) as I feel here; here i am Today I come to try to explain why.
The most synesthetic version (the first layer) says that it is because of its aroma, an aroma that sticks to your skin and soul —that accompanies you far beyond the room and stays inside you: cedar, dates, jasmine, orange blossom, rose wood and orange peel; an aroma that invades each instance (we have brought all possible objects: candles, perfumes or incense) work of the nose Olivia Giacobetti. I have burned a couple of lines of Milena Busquets (from when she wrote about everyday things, before the hurricane of This Too Shall Pass): “To get drunk without drinking alcohol, to dress up as Scheherazade without taking off her jeans and to be half naked while dressed. Really. That's what good perfumes are for. Nope?".
Illustration of La Mamounia, by Laura Velasco.
The second layer is more difficult to explain because it is imbricated in time, it cannot be a coincidence that part of its ideology is precisely that: “The art of suspending time”. And it is that here the hours have a different texture and I am clear that much of the blame lies with the history of the big dame, that's why sometimes you feel small (when you are aware of the centuries that inhabit these corridors... that unmistakable feeling of being part of the dream) and sometimes a King in his exuberant palace. To find the origins of sleep we must go back to the seventeenth century and the creation of the first Arsat, the original garden of the oasis that is today La Mamounia —walking through these gardens is walking through memory and legend; orange trees, lemon trees, jacarandas, palm trees, rose bushes and centenary olive trees. Bougainvillea, amaranth-colored pitas, Madagascar periwinkles, prickly pears and geraniums. Laura blossoms on these walks. The time stops.
The third layer is the exuberance , the awareness attached to the skin of this art of living. After the recent renovation (work of Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku ) this idea of more is more —I have it perfectly clear, minimalism bores me more and more— rises to the sky. 300 artisans carving ceilings, patios and fountains with infinite care: wood, tadelakt, zellige, plaster and metal; Arabic-Andalusian architecture receives and welcomes, calms and moves. Moroccan embroidery, the ancestral carving of the craftsman, glazed terracotta mosaics, stone and marble. In some way impossible to explain, history travels through this place. But this is the weirdest thing: makes you feel part of it.
There is another layer, the most valuable if possible: the 650 people working with a single purpose, your extreme well-being. The transcendence. Have a good time. And here they are memorable. Here the couples with doubts dissipate them (because everything is skin) and whoever is empty returns broken, because La Mamounia is a mirror: it only amplifies what already is. That is why we have promised each other, Laura and I, that we will return every year; because in these gardens we are, because when I think why I travel, I remember those days in marrakech. And I want to go back. And be.