Marrakech after two years without tourists: “Everything is paralyzed”

After almost two years of health crisis, with only a few months of respite last fall, Marrakech accumulates the fatigue of seeing how its shops, restaurants and hotels close in the absence of visitors, who feed all sectors of a city designed by and for the sightseeing.

Shutters drawn on the shops in the souk, few restaurants open, a Jemaa al Fna square without snake charmers… the picture of Marrakech this January, aggravated by the closure of Moroccan borders, is unrecognizable in a place that usually boils at every time of the day.

Pending tourist activity data, the sector expects 2021 to be a year with results similar to those recorded in 2020 compared to the pre-pandemic period, when hotel overnight stays in Marrakech went from 8.3 million to 1.8 million (79% less) .

“Everything is paralyzed, there are still shops open in the souk but people are sitting at the door doing nothing,” summarizes Ali, a tour guide who has been living for two years on his savings and a rented apartment he owns.

Many of his classmates had to take their children out of private schools because it cost at least 1,500 dirhams (150 euros) per month, and they survive with the help of 2,000 dirhams that the Government gives to professionals in the sector.

A breath in autumn

But this subsidy does not reach everyone (many do not have a license or face administrative obstacles) and it shows in the increase in beggars on the streets of Marrakech. “There are people who cannot pay their car loans or their houses. I have some neighbors who are drivers who are locked up at home all day, ”says Ali.

In these 22 months of crisis, the city’s tourism sector has had some respite, but it has not been enough. Last September, October and November there was an increase in tourists and it regained its former brilliance.

The phones began to ring with reservations for the end of the year, a particularly busy time in Marrakech, but the border closure decreed by Morocco on November 29 dashed their hopes. National tourism filled part of the hotels, although it did not save the sector.

Faced with this situation, some have chosen to leave the city and return to their villages to live with their parents, others sold their cars, minibuses or coaches and most survive by buying the essentials to live.

Like Zahira, who has a shop in the souk selling makeup, typical costumes and some souvenirs for tourists. “There is no one,” he laments from home because the store does not always open due to the lack of customers.

She lives with her daughter and her mother and they only buy what is really necessary. They survive on 700 dirhams a month: 200 to pay for electricity and 500 for other expenses.

dilapidated situation

Tourist workers in Marrakech live pending the opening of borders, closed for now until January 31 to prevent the omicron variant, which thus arrived in the country a little later but is already in full expansion phase.

If international flights were not resumed at the end of the month, Ali says, “it would be a very big disappointment” for the sector, whose carriers staged a demonstration in Rabat two weeks ago. Hotel employees, explains the guide, protest every week at the door of some establishments in Marrakech.

Abdessadaq Qadimi, president of the Regional Association of Guides of Marrakech, believes that to alleviate the closure, these workers could be temporarily employed in other sectors, such as translation or call centers. The guides (1,000 of Morocco’s 3,500 are in Marrakech) are, he says, “at a survival level” and, worse, without hope.

Qadimi points out that the crisis has left something positive: the Government has for the first time recognized certain social protection for the guides and has included them in the subsidy of 2,000 dirhams a month that it gives to the sector, but that many, he complains, have not managed to collect

“They can no longer stand it, tourism professionals, hotels, travel agencies and carriers are in a ruinous situation,” says this guide, and calls for a “strong decision by the State to support the sector”, with direct aid or jobs for the that depend on tourism, because “if there is at least activity, there is hope”.