Kasbah, medina, ksar, riad: Morocco's place-names explained

Medina simply means "city" in Arabic, but in Morocco it's come to mean something more specific: the old, historically walled core of a city, as distinct from the ville nouvelle, the newer district built up around it, mostly under the French protectorate in the early 20th century. Fez, Marrakech, and Essaouira all have one, and each is a genuinely different scale and shape of old town, not a single template.

A kasbah is a fortified citadel, built for defence and historically doubling as the seat of local power, a governor, caliph, or tribal leader. Sometimes that means a walled quarter inside a bigger medina, like the Kasbah of the Udayas in Rabat, and sometimes it means a standalone fortress-residence out on its own, which is the sense most travellers actually encounter in the south.

A ksar (plural: ksour) is more specific still: a fortified village, typically built collectively out of packed earth, or pisé, along the old pre-Saharan caravan routes, with several family compounds enclosed inside one shared defensive wall. Ait Benhaddou, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, is by far the best known, but dozens of smaller, far less visited ksour still stand along the Draa and Dades valleys.

A riad takes its name from the Arabic word for garden: a traditional house built around a central interior courtyard, often with a fountain, citrus trees, or a small planted garden, with rooms opening inward rather than onto the street. A similar house without that enclosed garden is technically a dar, not a riad, though in practice the word "riad" now gets used loosely by hotels for almost any converted traditional guesthouse.