The city of Marrakech woke up this Saturday in “shock” after the earthquake experienced last night, which shook its medina and forced its inhabitants to sleep almost with nothing on in the streets and squares, hearing non-stop ambulances around them.
At dawn, seven hours after the magnitude 7 earthquake that shook the region and left hundreds dead in several towns in Morocco, the first image that Marrakech offers are dozens of people wrapped in blankets sleeping on sidewalks, squares and parks, surrounded by bundles and suitcases.
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Eleven minutes after eleven at night, an earthquake that had not been experienced in decades and that lasted, say the neighbors, between three and four minutes, with shocks that looked like “bombs”, paralyzed this constantly boiling city.
The worst of the earthquake
The medina (old area), with an abundance of adobe buildings, took the brunt. A walk through its narrow streets reveals dozens of damaged houses, some half-demolished. Many are warehouses selling products for tourists, which this Saturday appeared lying and broken on the floor when the blinds were raised.
Early in the morning, some neighbors were already trying to collect some rubble. Like Abdullah Mansari, who on a street turned into mountains of rubble, helps an old man put them into a car. He still hasn’t dared to enter his house, he confesses.
“I was working in the market when we felt the earthquake. I am 36 years old and this is the first time I have experienced this. We became afraid and went to the square to take refuge. “I slept there”. Abdullah is referring to the nearby mythical Jemaa el Fna square, where hundreds of people gathered to sleep under the open sky for fear of aftershocks.
In addition to Abdullah, there were tourists like Pablo Segarra, 21, and his four friends, all from Elche, who slept on the cement of the square with two other Spaniards they met in Marrakech: Gorka Pagani and his father, from Bilbao. .
Along with his backpacks, water bottles, slippers and some blankets, Pablo says that the earthquake surprised the six of them having tea on the roof of their hostel.
“Suddenly everything started to shake and smoke started coming out of the center of the riad (hotel), so we had to run down. “Then we saw a very harsh scene, with many half-collapsed buildings and people on the ground who we didn’t know what state they were in.”Pablo tells EFE.
Gorka claims that it happened “from one moment to another” and they went down to the street “a shock”. “I didn’t know if I was in a movie, there were people on the ground”he confesses sleepily with his father a few meters away from him.
Marrakech
In the province of Marrakech, the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior reported that as of seven in the morning there had been 13 deaths, of the total of 632 registered at that time, especially in the province of Al Haouz, south of Marrakech and close to the epicenter.
Margarita Pacheco lived it as “a bomb”. “A roar began to sound and I said to myself: ‘It’s an attack’”This Spanish woman tells EFE. “It lasted about four or five minutes, I have never seen a house like it in my life, we dropped the television, the vases, the mirrors.”
Brahim, who lives in the medina and has several buildings in the old town, expected, however, more than a 7-degree tremor. “It’s a lot”he says before entering a craft center he owns.
And the last major earthquake remembered in the Maghreb country occurred in 2004 in Al Hoceima, in the northern Rif region. It was 6.3 degrees and 628 people died.
In Marrakech there are far fewer, but Mohamed, who keeps the cars in an open-air parking lot near the large square, will never forget the night when, he notes, “Ambulances didn’t stop passing by.”
