The current layout of the Secret Garden features an exotic garden and an Islamic one. The first, which brings together plants from all over the world, is inspired by the rich gardens of Marrakech. A city that, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, was conceived as a garden city. For example “a rose among the palms”, “an oasis in the desert” or “Al-Bahja”, the city of peace and open air, are some of its historical nicknames. And also the gardens of Agdal and Menara can show this idea.
The Islamic garden was restored maintaining what is presumed to be the nineteenth-century layout. Very similar to the concept of the riad, this type of garden was a true oasis of peace, dedicated to rest and contemplation under the shade of the trees and the intimacy of the enclosed space. The four-part layout of the Islamic garden (already found in the 6th century BC in the Persian gardens of Cyrus the Great), conceived to optimize the irrigation of the ground, recalls the description of paradise in the Quran. And the garden is conceived as a metaphor for paradise: that is, a sacred place, arranged according to rigid geometric rules, in which the Muslim order asserts itself over the wild disorder of nature.
