Which Is Better, Bahia Palace Or El Badi Palace? Pairing One With A Free Walking Tour

This question sits inside the Bahia Palace guide and its companion page on El Badi Palace and the Saadian Tombs, which carry the full entry detail for each monument.

Quick Facts

Which Is Better, Bahia Palace Or El Badi Palace?

Neither palace wins on price or access: both charge foreign adults 100 MAD, both admit children aged 7 to 13 for 50 MAD, and neither offers free entry to visitors on any day. The difference is the experience. Bahia keeps painted ceilings, carved stucco and tiled courtyards you walk through; El Badi is a vast sunken ruin of walls, terraces and stork nests. Choose rooms versus ruins, then pair the visit with a free walking tour nearby.

The two palaces sit at opposite ends of the same story. Bahia was built as a private residence, and it still reads that way: a sequence of courtyards, reception halls and riad gardens where the decoration survived. El Badi was built as a grand reception palace and was later stripped, so what remains is the skeleton, an enormous courtyard surrounded by sunken gardens, rampart walks and pavilion walls. One closes around you; the other opens out.

Both monuments are Ministry of Culture sites, and the Ministry sells one ticket per monument through its e-services platform, which went live on 3 April 2025. There is no combined pass covering the two palaces, so a visitor doing both in one day buys two separate tickets at 100 MAD each. The Ministry also confirms that free entry on Fridays and the first day of national and religious holidays applies to Moroccan nationals only; a foreign visitor cannot use those days to skip the fee, and the 30 MAD rate needs a Moroccan or resident document.

Restoration is the shared wildcard. Bahia Palace, El Badi Palace and the Saadian Tombs all reopened in October 2023 after securing works following the September 2023 earthquake, and works continue, so scaffolding or restricted sections can appear at either palace without notice. Anyone promising a fully restored building at either site is ahead of what the official record supports. Budget your expectations, not just your dirhams.

For the walk itself, the free options are strong. Every walk on this site is free, pay what you want, reserved on GuruWalk or, for three walks, on freetour.com, and the medina's two biggest palace clusters each sit within reach of a walk's meeting point. The walks below are the three most useful pairings for a palace day, starting from the Koutoubia and Jemaa el-Fnaa ends of the medina.

What Is The Short Answer?

Choose Bahia Palace if you want finished interiors, colour and craft: its painted ceilings, carved doorways and tiled courtyards are why it became the medina's most visited monument. Choose El Badi Palace if you want scale, silence and photography: its empty walls, sunken gardens and storks give you a ruin you read from the terraces. For one visit only, Bahia is the safer bet; El Badi suits a second visit or a quieter afternoon.

The short answer bends on one practical point: crowd tolerance is not published in any official figure, and this site does not estimate it. What is certain is what each palace physically is. Bahia is a dense complex of rooms; you move through doorways, look up at ceilings, and the visit is an interior experience. El Badi is mostly exterior; you climb, you look down across the great courtyard, and the visit is an open-air one.

Money is identical, so it genuinely cannot break the tie. A foreign adult pays 100 MAD at either gate and 50 MAD per child aged 7 to 13. If you are travelling as a family, each palace carries the same per-person cost, and doing both in one day simply doubles the ticket bill before any other monument. Some visitors decide on that arithmetic alone and pick the single palace that matches their taste.

There is a third answer that costs nothing: see both palaces from the outside and spend the ticket money elsewhere. The streets around both are free to walk, the Mellah lanes beside Bahia are free, and Place des Ferblantiers, a public square with no ticket, sits between the two palace sites. The do I need tickets to visit Bahia Palace question has its own full answer, but the short version is yes, and only the streets around it are free.

One free walk earns its place in any palace plan. Unveiling the Secrets of Marrakech, listed on GuruWalk and rated 4.91 out of 5 across 1,171 GuruWalk reviews, meets at the white dome on Koutoubia square and runs 2 hours 15 minutes in English, free to join and pay what you want at the end. Its guide is Mohamed amine, and its neighbourhood is Koutoubia and the central medina, the same end of the medina from which both palaces are reached on foot. Its own tour page carries the meeting detail and the reservation.

What Should You Know Before You Go?

Buy separate tickets for each palace, plan for scaffolding, and expect no free day: foreign adults pay 100 MAD at both sites every day of the week, while children aged 7 to 13 pay 50 MAD. The Ministry of Culture sells one ticket per monument through its e-services ticketing platform, live since 3 April 2025, and 2023 earthquake restoration continues at both sites, so parts may be closed or scaffolded whenever you arrive.

Practically, the two palaces reward different kinds of visit. Bahia Palace is a warren, and its interest is inside its rooms; if decoration is what you came for, anything covered in scaffolding costs you more of the visit. El Badi Palace is a terrace experience; even with a section closed, the walls, the scale and the storks remain, and a partial closure bites less. Neither site publishes a completion date for the works, and no source worth trusting gives one. The official ticket channel is the Ministry's own e-services ticketing platform, one monument at a time.

The free context around each ticket is worth planning too. Around Bahia, the Mellah's streets and market lanes are free to walk, and Bab Agnaou and the city ramparts are free to see from the street at any hour, though some rampart stretches may carry scaffolding. Around El Badi, Place des Ferblantiers is a free public square. These free pieces are not consolation prizes; they are the reason a palace day can start with a free walk and still feel complete.

Watch for the ticket traps. Third-party reseller websites that look official circulate for Marrakech monuments; the Ministry's own e-services platform is the real sales channel, one monument at a time, with no unified pass across Moroccan sites. Anyone at a gate or square telling you a palace is "closed today" and offering to guide you instead is running the oldest line in the medina; the answer is the palace's own entrance.

The earthquake timeline matters because it is misreported constantly. The three Ministry sites reopened in October 2023, three years before the date some secondary pages give, and works have continued since. A visitor in late 2026 should assume active restoration somewhere on both sites, not a finished product, and should treat any "fully restored" claim as false.

Which Free Walking Tours Cover This?

No free walk enters either palace, since both are ticketed, but the pay-what-you-want city walks reserved on GuruWalk or freetour.com bring you to the right part of the medina with a local guide: the Koutoubia and central medina walks meet nearest the Bahia end, the Jemaa el-Fnaa walks closer to the souks, and the night walks cover the city after ticket desks close.

The closest meeting points cluster around the Koutoubia. Youssef's English City Guide, the GuruWalk walk rated 4.78 out of 5 across 1,173 GuruWalk reviews, meets at the white shrine near the Koutoubia and runs 2 hours 30 minutes in English. The Old City Secrets walk, listed on freetour.com and rated 9.6 out of 10 across 938 freetour.com reviews, meets at Cafe Restaurant Le Samovar and runs 2 hours 45 minutes. Both are free to join and pay what you want, and both start you inside the central medina where a palace walk to either site begins.

From the Jemaa el-Fnaa side, the Medina Walk From Jemaa El-Fnaa, a GuruWalk walk rated 4.85 out of 5 across 235 GuruWalk reviews, meets on the main square for 2 hours 30 minutes in English. There is also a 1-hour express walk in English and French, which has too few reviews for a score yet; it meets on Jemaa el-Fnaa and exists as a page on this site rather than a featured card. For evening, the 2-Hour Night Walk, a GuruWalk walk by Abdellah rated 4.88 out of 5 across 91 GuruWalk reviews, meets at the white dome on Koutoubia square.

For a longer day that ends near the palaces, Mustapha's 2-Hour Medina Walk, a GuruWalk walk rated 4.9 out of 5 across 987 GuruWalk reviews, meets at Koutoubia Mosque square and runs 2 hours. It is free to join, but its GuruWalk page flags possible extra costs such as entrance fees along the way, so treat it as free with extras, never as a walk with a price. Its neighbourhood is Koutoubia and the central medina, the same streets that lead toward both palace gates.

The full spread of 13 free walking tours, every one pay what you want, is laid out in the free walking tours in Marrakech guide, and the free versus paid walking tours comparison covers who each style suits. The site behind both, Free Things To Do In Marrakech, is a directory of genuinely free things to do in the city, monetised through each walk's page on GuruWalk or freetour.com and nothing else.

Mistakes That Trip People Up At The Palaces

The four mistakes that cost visitors money: believing a Friday free day applies to them, buying from a lookalike reseller site, assuming the palaces are finished post-earthquake, and merging the free surroundings with the paid interiors into one "free palace" plan. Foreign adults pay 100 MAD at both palaces every day, the Ministry platform is the only official ticket channel, and restoration is ongoing at both sites. The free parts here are streets, squares and ramparts, never palace rooms.

The Friday trap is the most common. The free entry at Bahia, El Badi, the Saadian Tombs and the Almoravid Koubba on Fridays and the first day of national and religious holidays is for Moroccan nationals, and the discounted 30 MAD rate needs a Moroccan or resident document. A foreign visitor arriving on a Friday hoping for a free palace finds the same 100 MAD ticket as any other day.

The reseller trap is the most expensive. Domains that mimic official monument sites sell marked-up or unnecessary tickets; the Ministry of Culture's e-services platform is the real channel, selling one ticket per monument with no combined pass. The reseller blocklist on this site's research side is long, and the safe rule is short: buy from the Ministry platform or at the gate.

The "it is closed today" trap sits at street level. A stranger telling you the palace is closed and offering to guide you to a shop or a viewpoint instead is the standard opener; the palace entrance itself is the only source of truth. This is the same pattern documented at the tanneries, where no tariff exists, viewing is tied to a leather shop terrace, and a tip or purchase is expected.

The merging trap is subtler. The Mellah streets, Place des Ferblantiers, Bab Agnaou and the ramparts are genuinely free, and a good free walking tour threads them together. But Bahia's rooms and El Badi's terraces are paid, and no walk, free or otherwise, includes them. Plan the free morning and the paid afternoon as two separate things and neither disappoints.

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