Minaret of Koutoubia

The rebuilding starts again immediately. The plans are entrusted to a Spanish architect, Gueber of Seville, which will build Giralda of Seville and the Tower Hassan de Rabat. The beauty of Koutoubia conceived to shelter one of highest (77 meters in top of the arrow) and the most beautiful minaret of the Maghreb were finally never equalized.

Dimensions of second Koutoubia are exactly the same ones as those of the first. Built out of stones and bricks, it 90 60 meters meters is broad and long. It comprises 16 parallel naves of equal width as well as built median nave a perpendicular to the wall of prayers. The central nave is covered with 7 cupolas, the last recovering the mihrab.

The pulpit of sermon: the minbar has an enormous historical value. Imposing by its size: 9 degrees, nearly 4 meters in height and 3.50 meters of depth, it was carried out in Cordoue in 1120 at the request of Ali Ben Youssef for his own mosque, largest of the mosque almoravide, destroyed later on. Encrusted with ivory, of wood of ebony and sandal, not only it constitutes because of its beauty, the original model many minbar dispersed in the Maghreb or Moslem Spain, but it remains the only tangible vestige of the mosque of Ali.

Koutoubia imposes the respect which agrees a few minutes to admire it by the conjugation of an elegance without fault with a great sobriety. The minaret, only vestige of the first mosque, was built before the construction of the second mosque. It is a square tower of 12,8 meters side and 69 meters height, built out of sandstone hardcores.

This Moorish tower constitutes the most beautiful monument of the 12th century almohade. Each one of its faces is encrusted with different decorations, with networks of interlacings carved in the stucco, as if four different architects had tried to represent the celestial doors. At the top of the tower, a skylight of 16 meters, with him only a small minaret, is capped with a dome which supports a capped arrow of three balls and a gilded copper point very. The dome is girdled by a covered way which one sees the crenelated balustrade which hiding place the base of the skylight on more than three meters. The interior of the tower makes up of six rooms superimposed around whose a slope formerly made it possible to reach the platform on a horse. While was built Koutoubia, the beasts of burden charged with the stones and the mortar thus could supply the workmen manufacturers.

For which comes from Essaouira, of Safi, Fès or Ouarzazate, this minaret is seen to 30 or 40 kilometers of Marrakech. For the tourists who fear to be mislaid, this minaret makes function of surer benchmarks.

The Koutoubia mosque owes its name with the "kutubiyin" or booksellers, who in XIIème and XIIIème centuries came to sell their goods on the square of the mosque. The minaret, completed under the reign of the sultan Yacoub el-Mansour (XIIème century), is regarded as a chief of Moorish work of art hispano-

The harmonious proportions and the decorative richness of the ornamental panels of the various faces of the building make the pride of Marrakchis. Dominating the city and its surroundings top of its 70 meters, the minaret, symbol of the city, is also an excellent benchmark for those which have been suddenly mislaid...