Seth Sherwood
Spa Magazine

These days, Morocco's neighborhood hammams are largely secular, convivial places. "It's a place where families go to get clean and also to see friends," says Kader Boufraine, the French-Moroccan owner of a boutique hotel-spa in the Medina called Les Bains de Marrakech, which supplements the traditional hammam experience with crisp, West Elm-meets-North Africa design.

La Sultana and Les Bains de Marrakech are typical of the new generation of Marrakech spas, which are geared toward individuals and couples rather than large same-sex groups. (Traditional hammams are gender segregated.) The hammam rooms themselves have been shrunk into intimate, personal spaces, and treatment ingredients like black soap get jazzed up with eucalyptus or heady fragrances. Exfoliations might be done with desert sand mixed with rose water, and post-hammam massages are de rigueur.

Riad Medhi, for example, offers rubdowns using mint-steamed towels (a nice riff on the ubiquitous Moroccan tradition of drinking mint tea) or local rhassoul clay (prized for its ability to absorb impurities and soften the skin). Typically, the new spas' decors appropriate old-world Moroccan details--keyhole doorways, geometrically sculpted plaster and kaleidoscopic mosaics--into contemporary ethno-chic collages.

You really feel cut off from the world out here," says Lenka Lach Manova, the spa director of the exclusive Palais Rhoul retreat, as we sit in cozy couches under a vast white tent on the hotel's manicured grounds. Situated outside the ochre-hued walls of the teeming Medina, Palais Rhoul was one of the first high-end hotels to sprout in the lush palm-planted area of Marrakech known as the Palmeraie. The unusually verdant swath--rumored to be the spawn of date seeds discarded by the city's 11th-century founders--has recently emerged as a Bel Air-like hideaway of private estates and opulent resorts.

No other establishments, however, can boast Palais Rhoul's trump card: Mr. Abdel Kader. Schooled in a special form of Moroccan massage called tkssila, Kader is a cult figure on the Marrakech spa scene. "You won't find this massage style anywhere else," Lach Manova says. The esoteric technique, she explains, passes from father to son and is rarely practiced outside of the insular world of neighborhood hammams. 

Stocky, mustachioed and wearing a white guru-like outfit, Kader appears with a mischievous smile and leads me into the hotel's hammam, which dazzles with carved stone and lovely tile. What unfolds is the extreme-sports version of hammam-going. The marble floor, on which I am placed to loosen my muscles, is so hot that it has me immediately squirming like a baby as the heat waves melt my tenseness into the ground. Next, Kader slaps on the black soap and proceeds with a powerful rubdown that could pacify a boxer into staying in his corner. There's no music, no chat, no distractions--just the sounds of his veteran hands slapping the butter-like mounds of beldi on my superheated limbs. He douses me with scalding water, dons the textured glove and begins exfoliating my flesh like a carpenter sanding a very, very stubborn board. The scraping is rhythmic, metronomic--and more than a little painful. Nowhere is spared, not even the insides of my ears.

"You have a lot of dead skin," he says, amused. The glove looks like someone had run it over a wet newspaper. Then, the mysterious tkssila massage. As I lie face down on the hot marble floor, he begins applying crushing downward pressure on my back, shoulders and legs, followed by slow outward plowing motions. He turns me over and does the same on my chest. Then he seizes one foot at a time, pulls each toe quickly outward--pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!--and cracks each ankle. Next, he straightens my right leg, puts it on his shoulder and begins walking toward me while my other leg lies straight and extended on the ground. It's like a compass opening--a very rusty compass--and stretches long-forgotten back and leg muscles.

He does the other leg, then lies on the ground, somehow slides his feet beneath me and lifts me up by my back so that I am suddenly bowed backwards and seeing the room upside down. Each successive pose is increasingly acrobatic as my body is corkscrewed one way, then another, then pulled by the limbs. Finally, after I am allowed a quick restorative splash in the domed, octagonal cold pool--a minor marvel of stonework--he slices some fresh oranges and rubs them on my cleansed and soft epidermis.