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The museum of Marrakech is an old residence – the Mnebhi palace – transformed into an art museum. Mehdi Mnebhi was the Minister of defence of the king Moulay Abdelaziz (1894- 1908). The palace, built in the XIXth century, has become one of the most privileged cultural places in Marrakech, located in the heart of its oldest districts.

In 1997, Omar Benjelloun, an art lover, took care of the restoration and rehabilitation of the museum. It was inaugurated on March 14th of the same year, as the first private museum of the city.
The museum of Marrakech is managed and financed by the foundation Omar Benjelloun, and it presents an important asset for the cultural landscape of the town, but also of the whole country.

The Marrakech museum organizes only temporary expositions around two subjects: The Moroccan cultural inheritance, and contemporary art. The “douiria” and “hammam” are reserved for contemporary art expositions, whereas the patio and contiguous rooms are used for patrimonial collections expositions.
The museum contains Berber, Muslim and Jewish objects. In the ground floor, there are expositions of ethnographic objects such as clothes, weapons, and Berber jewels. Those objects are still used in the Moroccan mountainous areas. Moreover, the museum exposes archaeological objects and historical documents.

The Marrakech museum contains also a small tearoom, used sometimes as an open exposition space for young artists. One also finds there an artistic bookshop that was created back in 1999, to sell art books and various other articles.
The museum publishes and co-publishes catalogues of expositions and art books about Morocco.

The museum is open daily from 9.00 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., and the entry costs 30 Dirhams.