Moulay El Yazid (Kasbah) Mosque

Overview

The Kasbah Mosque — officially the Moulay El Yazid Mosque, and known historically as El Mansouria — is the great mosque of Marrakech's royal quarter, founded by the Almohads in the 1180s. Its minaret, banded with green tiles and carved sebka lattice, is one of the medina's landmarks, and it's the marker generations of visitors have used to find the hidden entrance to the Saadian Tombs beside it.

The mosque was built around 1185–1190 under the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur, at the same time as the Kasbah and Bab Agnaou, to serve the sultan and his court. It later fell into disrepair and was rebuilt, and it takes its modern name from the Alaouite sultan Moulay el Yazid, who is buried in the Saadian necropolis alongside. As a working place of worship, its interior is closed to non-Muslims, but the exterior and especially the minaret are freely admired.

That minaret is the draw: a tall square tower decorated with the interlacing sebka arch motif and a broad band of turquoise-green faience, topped by the traditional lantern and orbs. It's a textbook example of Almohad minaret design, a smaller sibling of the Koutoubia, and it dominates the low roofline of the Kasbah quarter, doubling as a navigation aid across the southern medina.

For most visitors the mosque is inseparable from the Saadian Tombs, whose narrow entrance passage was famously sealed for centuries and opens off the mosque's side — the tombs were only rediscovered and made accessible in 1917. Together with Bab Agnaou a few steps away, the mosque and tombs form the core of a compact, walkable circuit through Marrakech's imperial quarter.