Morocco · The imperial city
If Marrakech is the showman, Fes is the scholar. The oldest of Morocco's imperial cities, it has been a center of learning and craft for more than a thousand years, and its great walled medina still hums with the same trades that built it.
We always say the same thing before you go: do not try to map Fes el-Bali in your head. The old city is a glorious tangle of some nine thousand lanes, far too dense for a phone to make sense of, so we send you in with a local guide who knows which doorway opens onto a hidden medersa and which alley leads down to the tanneries. You will move from the clang of the coppersmiths to the quiet of a tiled courtyard in the space of a few minutes.
Give it two nights and stay inside the walls in a restored riad. Waking to the call to prayer over the rooftops, then stepping straight into the medina before the day warms up, is the Fes that stays with you.
