Cigar Shops and Cigar Lounges in Marrakech: The 2026 Guide

If Morocco has a cigar capital, it is Marrakech. Two of the kingdom’s five official shops keep counter here, the country’s finest smoking lounges occupy its palaces, and the city concentrates within a few kilometres what the rest of the territory scatters. What remains is knowing where to go, when, and how not to ruin your cigars in the driest city on the circuit.

Why Marrakech concentrates everything

Three reasons compound. First, the density of palaces: La Mamounia, the Royal Mansour, the Selman, Es Saadi, houses with the means for a properly kept humidor and trained staff. Then the international clientele, which sustains an offering the local market alone could not. Finally the Hivernage district, which gathers shops and bars within a few streets, where Casablanca scatters its addresses across the whole city.

The result: it is the only Moroccan city where you can buy a box, settle into a lounge to smoke it, and dine ten minutes away without ever getting back in the car.

Cigar shops in Marrakech: Hivernage and M Avenue

La Casa del Habano, shop and lounge

Opened on 25 April 2018 at 1572, Résidence Prestige, rue Hafid Ibrahim, the Hivernage shop is the anchor point: a walk-in humidor you step into to choose, private lockers for regulars, and a genuine tasting lounge with its happy hours. The house even offers a membership giving access to a private room and your own locker, and it is run by an owner who is himself an aficionado, which shows in the first piece of advice you get.

Mind the sign: this address now also trades as HAVANA Lounge & Restaurant, the house having widened the venue to dining and live music. Same street, same walk-in humidor: if your driver does not know “La Casa del Habano”, give him “Havana Lounge, rue Hafid Ibrahim”. It settles both questions at once, buying and smoking, without having to negotiate your cigar with a maître d’.

A second, more recent address keeps the counter on M Avenue, the district’s new artery, under the name Habanos Especialist by Mehdi Bennani (unit L110): a Habanos label one notch below Casa del Habano, same operator, a tighter shop, handy for a quick purchase.

These two counters are the only ones in Marrakech supplied by the exclusive Havana distributor; our guide to the buying channels explains why that matters, and our official price list gives the rate for every vitola.

Outside the Havana circuit, one buying address counts: L’Épicerie Fine & Co, on boulevard Mohammed VI in the Agdal zone, a wine merchant and luxury grocer that keeps a Davidoff-branded cigar cellar, close to 120 references, open daily from 10 am to 8 pm. It is the only Davidoff counter identified in town, and the natural complement to the two Habanos counters for anyone after something other than a Cuban.

Cigar bars around Hivernage

The Bar Selman advertises cocktails “and cigars” on its own menu, with a choice of the great brands: it is the district’s safe bet outside the palaces, open every evening from 6 pm to 1 am, with a resident electro-lounge DJ and sharing plates to match. The Piano Bar at Es Saadi, more hushed and vintage, rounds out the list for varying your evenings without leaving Hivernage, and helps when the palaces are full.

Le Palace, on avenue Echouhada, is the district’s night address: a French restaurant, a champagne bar with DJs and, set back without being cut off, a cigar lounge of red velvet armchairs and woodwork, extended by a quieter terrace where you smoke at the table. The drinks list rivals a great Parisian bar’s; you come for the whole evening, not for a quiet vitola.

A few minutes away, in Guéliz, the Arroz Bar plays the tapas-bar register with a well-stocked cigar cabinet: Davidoff, Camacho, Zino, the whole Davidoff family, served with the house cocktails. It is the address Davidoff Maroc chose for its Private Club evening in September 2026, which says enough about the place it has taken among the city’s aficionados.

Still in Guéliz, on rue Imam Chafii, Habanera is the dry-aged steak house, open daily from 5 pm to 2 am with live music. The house now serves Davidoff, the Late Hour Churchill first among them, to carry the meal on: the address for the after-dinner cigar rather than the lounge.

Three more bars own the cigar in black and white. At the northern end of Hivernage, opposite the Royal Theatre, the Havanita Lounge, Wine & Cigars at the Grand Plaza (formerly Opera Plaza) lines up a bar and a private room, club armchairs and a selection of Cubans, with a live band in the evening. In Guéliz, at 20 rue Ibn Aïcha, Montecristo, an institution since 2004, cultivates the Cuban theme: cigar and cocktail at Sinatra’s Bar, Havanas on the Sky Lounge terrace, late into the night. And on avenue Echouhada, the Nobu Bar & Lounge at the Nobu Hotel announces its “fine selection of cigars” alongside its cocktails, from 6 pm to 1 am. Still in Guéliz, NOSSO (rue du Draa, on the corner of rue du Lieutenant-Lamure), a garden lounge open all day — brunch, cocktails, shisha, matches on the big screen — lets you smoke a cigar at your table; most people bring their own.

Beyond Hivernage: the medina and the Palmeraie

Three addresses are worth the detour out of the district. In the medina, Dar Moha, 81 rue Dar El Bacha, is chef Moha’s eighteenth-century riad, Moroccan cuisine revisited around a zellige pool: lunch or dinner ends in the garden, cigar and glass in hand, as is the house custom. Book, and get directions, the address has to be earned. In the Palmeraie, the Ksar Char-Bagh, a Moorish palace of fifteen suites and a Relais & Châteaux member, keeps a cigar lounge beside its English billiards room and its library bar: the most discreet smoking room in town, to be booked like a table. Further still, on the Amizmiz road, Le Bar at the Fairmont Royal Palm keeps its own cigar lounge in the heart of the golf resort, open from 9 am to 1 am: a hushed room that comes alive in the evening, and a terrace over the park with the Atlas as a backdrop.

Three more palaces, out of the district. On the Ouarzazate road, the Vue Bar at the Oberoi serves wines, spirits and cigars to live piano, between Chesterfields and a fireplace, with the canal and the Atlas as a backdrop; next door, the bar at Amanjena keeps its cigar cellar and its after-dinner lounge, cigar and shisha. In the medina, near the Koutoubia, the Villa des Orangers keeps a cigar cellar in which to end the evening.

Cigar lounges in Marrakech: the palace bars

The Royal Mansour Cigar Bar

The only palace cigar lounge in the country formally identified as such. On the first floor of the main building, a humidor of precious wood, glass and mother-of-pearl, stocked with the great, mostly Cuban brands, and deep sofas in a dandy spirit where you settle in for the evening. One welcome particularity: the house allows your own cigar as long as you smoke it at the bar, which means you may arrive with a vitola brought from your travels. Hours are not published: book ahead. In the glass, a broad list of whiskies and rums, and Moroccan wines worth the curiosity.

La Mamounia’s Bar Churchill

The old-school smoking room, a tribute to the house’s most famous guest, to which Cigar Aficionado devoted its columns. The house took the decor all the way: the bar is fitted out as a Pullman carriage, a nod to the hotel’s railway past, in smoked oak with back-lit walls. Humidor at the bar, where Partagas holds pride of place, Havanas served with ceremony, from 6pm to 11pm. The dress code is strict: no beachwear after 6pm. This is where you go for the setting as much as for the cigar, and one of the few places in the country where the whole thing still amounts to a ritual.

A few steps from the Churchill, Le Grand Casino La Mamounia steps outside the smoking-room register: in May 2024 it ran an ash-holding contest, the “Long Ash”, with a box of twenty Davidoff among its prizes. Such gatherings are rare and are announced only days ahead; we keep track of them in cigar events in Morocco.

What Marrakech does to your cigars

Here is the point tourist guides forget, and it is worth all the address recommendations. Marrakech is very dry, more so than Casablanca or Tangier, which the Atlantic tempers, and an air-conditioned room dries the air further. A cigar lives at 65-70% humidity; left in the open in these conditions, it loses its oils within days. The symptoms are unambiguous: a dull wrapper, a band coming loose, a crack under the fingers as you cut, a burning draw.

Three reflexes are enough:

1. A rigid case for the day. Two or three fingers, never a shirt pocket: body heat and the sun on the square do the rest.
2. A humidity pack in your luggage. A Boveda 69% in an airtight box turns your suitcase into a travel humidor; our guide to humidity control covers the dosages.
3. Buy as you go. Rather than a box on day one, buy your vitolas as you need them: the stock stays in the shop’s humidor, which keeps it better than your room does.

For a longer stay, our guide to storing cigars in a hot, dry climate applies to Marrakech at double speed.

The framework: law, custom, dress code

Law 15-91 prohibits smoking in hospitals, government offices, public transport, theatres and classrooms. Cafés, restaurants, bars and hotels do not appear in it, and the reform voted in 2008 to add them was never published in the Official Bulletin. Local custom therefore comes down to three gestures: the terrace by default, indoors only where the house embraces it, and a word to the maître d’ when in doubt. The climate helps: in Marrakech a terrace is pleasant most of the year, and it is the best place for a cigar anyway.

As for dress, the palaces are formal after 6pm. A light jacket settles the question, and spares you discovering the dress code at the door of the Churchill.

The price is not negotiable

A useful reminder in a city where everything is haggled over: cigar prices are set by the state, published by customs circular, and identical across the official channel. A Montecristo No. 4 costs 150 DH in Marrakech as in Casablanca; a Cohiba Siglo I, 400 DH; a Behike, 2,000 to 2,800 DH per stick. Nobody will give you a deal, and that is good news: the regulated price protects you from the tourist markup.

The corollary is harsher: a cigar well below the list price is a fake. Around the medina as on social media, cut-price “Cubans” exist, and contraband accounts for more than 30% of national consumption. The official counter is not a preference, it is the only guarantee.

Three days in Marrakech, aficionado’s version

• Day 1, finding your feet. A visit to La Casa del Habano in Hivernage: pick two or three vitolas, ask about the current shipments, leave with a case. In the evening, smoke one on the spot in the shop’s lounge, informally.
• Day 2, the full performance. Book the Royal Mansour Cigar Bar or La Mamounia’s Bar Churchill, jacket on, a generous vitola and time ahead of you. This is the evening you will talk about back home.
• Day 3, the breather. A short vitola on a terrace in the late afternoon, then the purchases for the journey home: the customs allowance permits 25 cigars without declaration, exactly one box, provided you protect it for the trip. The duty free in Terminal 1 at Ménara airport does sell tobacco, cigars included, but do not count on it for a fine box: the choice is nothing like a walk-in humidor’s, and forgetting costs you dearly.

The visitor’s reflexes

1. Ring before you travel, shops and palace bars alike: irregular stocks on one side, unpublished hours on the other.
2. Buy at the official counter, never online or at the souk: there is no legal online sale of cigars in Morocco.
3. Protect your vitolas with a case and a humidity pack: the dryness of Marrakech is the chief enemy of your stay.
4. Start mild. Between the heat, the jet lag and a generous Moroccan dinner, a modest vitola serves the evening better than a trophy; our beginner’s guide applies to travellers too.

Marrakech will not replace Havana. But to smoke somewhere, under an arch in Hivernage, in the armchair of a bar where Churchill was a regular, with the Atlas mountains as a backdrop, few cities offer a setting worthy of a great vitola.