Villa Mabrouka

Friday, 9:20 a.m. · Puerta del Sol

An hour back on the clock

Villa Mabrouka was the Tangier house of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé: a 1940s modernist villa above the Strait of Gibraltar, with twelve rooms since Jasper Conran turned it into a hotel. From Madrid, you can be in its garden for Friday lunch.

Leave Puerta del Sol at 9:20. Barajas is 14 miles away, 35 minutes when the roads are clear, more in Friday traffic. In November 2026, Iberia’s Friday flight is timetabled at 11:25 a.m., landing at 11:55, Tangier time. Ryanair’s leaves at 1:15 p.m.

The flight is not thirty minutes long. Morocco has gone back to Greenwich time, and this winter Tangier runs an hour behind Madrid. The airport is about 30 minutes from the villa by car. Count four and a half hours, door to door, and you will still be early for lunch.

Friday, 1 p.m. · The door

Lunch before the key

You come in through a crenelated arched door, across a paved courtyard shaded by an old rubber tree and banana plants. Check-in is at 3 p.m. Have lunch first.

L’Orangerie serves breakfast, lunch and dinner on the terrace, looking across the garden to the sea. Book the table: the house asks diners to reserve in advance. From April to October there is a third choice, Luca’s Terrazza, where Roman pizza comes out of a wood oven. In winter it is closed.

Friday, 3 p.m. · Upstairs

Ask for the master bedroom

The twelve rooms are named for Moroccan towns. The one to ask for is Marrakech, once the master bedroom of the villa: 732 square feet, a dressing room, a bath and a shower. The house says its sage green, Tuscan yellow and cornflower blue were Saint Laurent’s favorite colors.

The bed faces glazed doors flanked by seventeenth-century Spanish tiles. Behind them is a sitting room where breakfast comes, with the garden, the sea and the coast of Spain in front of you. In the bathroom, lit by French sconces of the 1930s, a vast window frames the Strait. It is from €990 a night.

If Marrakech is taken, ask for Essaouira, the penthouse at the top of the main house: 560 square feet, reached by stairs, a glass-walled sitting room with a fireplace, seventeenth-century Andalusian tiles and a private terrace over the Strait, from €1,135. The smallest room, Ouazzane, is 151 square feet in a garden cottage by the pool, from €345.

Rates are the house’s own, checked in November 2026. You pay in full when you book and can cancel up to 30 days before arrival. Guests must be 14 or older.

Friday, sunset · The roof

Doves over the port

Go up to the roof at the end of the afternoon. The roof bar takes visitors, but people who come only for the bar do not enter the villa or the grounds. The bar is modeled on Le Corbusier and pours the classics. The house writes of doves and swifts in the evening sky, and the port lighting up as the sun goes down over the Strait.

Dinner is in the Dining Room, mirrored and warmly lit, with an anteroom clad in bamboo. Finish at Jake’s Bar, mirrored and lit by Murano glass sconces, under a large painting by Jalid, an artist from Tetouan.

Saturday, 10 a.m. · The medina

America’s landmark in Tangier

Walk down into the Kasbah and the medina, which the house puts close enough to reach on foot. Your address is the Tangier American Legation, given to the young United States by the Sultan of Morocco in 1821. It is the only US National Historic Landmark outside the country, and it opens from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends.

On the way back, the house’s own guide sends you to the Gran Café de Paris, where Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet once sat. Be back for lunch. The afternoon is for the garden.

Saturday afternoon · The garden

Two acres, and no photographs

The garden was laid out in the early 1990s by Madison Cox, under Saint Laurent and Bergé’s guidance, the house says. It falls in terraces toward the Strait of Gibraltar and the Atlantic: lawns, banana palms, bamboo, citrus, roses, agapanthus.

The large pool is cut into the rock of the cliff top, and its water is warmed by the stone, the house says. A smaller plunge pool is tiled in green herringbone. Both are for residents only, and so is the garden. In winter the house gives highs of about 62°F, and between September and November, 60 to 75°F.

Then the rule. The booking terms forbid cameras, video and any other recording device on the premises, and a phone is one. You will not post this garden.

You can sleep in Saint Laurent’s garden. You cannot photograph it.

Afternoon tea is served every day from 3 to 6 p.m., in the Summer Pavilion or at Elsie’s Bar on the sitting-room veranda. If the wind comes up from the Strait, book the hammam instead: tadelakt and marble, light through old Roman glass, black soap, ghassoul clay and a scrub with the kessala glove. It takes appointments from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Sunday, 8 a.m. · The sitting room

Breakfast facing Spain

Have breakfast in the room, the last thing you do here: the sitting room of Marrakech looks across the garden and the water to the coast of Spain, where you are going.

Iberia’s 12:25 p.m. flight back, which flew on Sunday, November 8, lands in Madrid at 2:50 p.m.; leave the villa by 10:45. Ryanair’s Sunday flight leaves at 7:05 a.m., which costs you the breakfast. Check-out is at noon in any case, and the 10 percent service charge is settled at the desk.

If you can stay a third night, the house’s guide suggests Asilah, about forty-five minutes away by car, and a flight home on Monday.