Marrakesh is a city of southern Morocco at the foot of the High Atlas, founded around 1070 by the Sanhaja Almoravid leader Yusuf ibn Tashfin as the new capital of the Almoravid empire. The Berber-language toponym, conventionally derived from a Tamazight expression for "land of God" or simply for the place, gave the modern country its European name (Morocco from Marrakesh).
Almoravid Marrakesh was the political centre of an empire that at its height stretched from the Senegal river to the Ebro in Spain. The Koutoubia minaret of 1184 and its twin in Seville (the Giralda) and Rabat (the Hassan tower) date from the immediately following Masmuda Almohad period, when Marrakesh was rebuilt as the capital of a still larger Berber empire under Abd al-Mu'min and his successors.
The city retained its capital status under the Saadians of the sixteenth century, who built the El Badi palace and the Saadian tombs, and lost it under the Alaouites, who moved the imperial seat to Meknes and Fez in succession. Under colonial and modern administration Marrakesh has functioned as the principal southern Moroccan city, and as the cultural and tourism capital of the Atlas-Souss sphere.
The medina, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, encloses the Koutoubia, the Bahia and El Bahia palaces, the Ben Youssef madrasa, and the Jemaa el-Fna square — the latter inscribed in 2001 as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity for its continuous tradition of Tamazight and Arabic oral storytelling, music, and performance.