Why can you hear everything inside a riad?
The short answer
The open courtyard is a vertical amphitheatre. Hard surfaces of zellige, plaster, and stone amplify every sound — a cough downstairs, a door bolt, someone's alarm at 6am. Traditional wooden doors have gaps and ventilation openings that were designed for airflow, not privacy. Upper floors are quieter. You're sleeping inside an acoustic instrument.
A riad is acoustically the opposite of a hotel. The courtyard that makes it beautiful also makes it a resonance chamber.
The open central courtyard — surrounded by hard surfaces of zellige tile, carved plaster, and stone — functions like a vertical amphitheatre. Sound travels up the well and bounces off every surface. A conversation at the breakfast table carries to the second-floor balcony. A metal door latch closing on the ground floor announces itself to the terrace. Water in a fountain, footsteps on tile, chairs scraping — the courtyard collects and amplifies everything.
Room doors compound this. Traditional Moroccan doors are heavy carved wood fitted into stone frames — beautiful, but rarely airtight. Gaps under the door, decorative iron grilles above, and sometimes intentional ventilation openings mean that courtyard sound enters every room. The metal bolt-and-padlock closures used in many traditional riads are loud by design — they were security features, not convenience hardware.
This is the same architectural logic that makes riads feel alive rather than sterile. The sound of the fountain, the morning birds, the distant call to prayer filtering through the courtyard — these are the atmospheric qualities that make a riad stay feel fundamentally different from a hotel. The tradeoff is that you'll also hear the other guests having dinner, the staff preparing breakfast, and the courtyard door opening at midnight.
Rooms on upper floors tend to be quieter than ground-floor rooms (which sit directly on the courtyard). Rooms at the back of the riad, away from the street-facing wall, catch less external noise. Sound-sensitive guests tend to request upper-floor rooms when booking. Earplugs turn up in a lot of riad reviews — not because something is wrong, but because sleeping inside a 300-year-old acoustic instrument is an experience.