Fes, Morocco: the walled medina, the tanneries and the oldest university

Evergreen city guide with quick facts, travel, business, and culture.

MoroccoFès-Meknès

Overview

Fes holds the largest car-free urban area in the world — a walled medieval medina of nine thousand lanes, still working as a craft city rather than performing as one.

The Car-Free Medina

The largest car-free urban area in the world — nine thousand lanes, handcarts and donkeys, and no rationalised street plan.

Madrasas & Al-Qarawiyyin

Colleges worked in carved cedar, stucco and zellige, beside a university founded in 859 and still running.

Working Crafts

Hand-cut zellige tile, beaten brass, Fes blue pottery and the Chouara tanneries — an economy, not a display.

The Country's Best Table

Pastilla, harira and slow tagines — Fes is generally taken to be Morocco's culinary capital.

Culture

Fes is generally regarded as Morocco's culinary capital, and pastilla is the proof: a layered pie of paper-thin warqa pastry, traditionally pigeon and now often chicken, spiced with cinnamon and almonds and finished with sugar — sweet and savoury in the same mouthful. Harira, the thick tomato and lentil soup, is everywhere, as are tagines slow-cooked with preserved lemon and olives or with prunes and almonds. Khlii, preserved spiced meat, turns up at breakfast with eggs. The best meals are often served in riads and usually need ordering hours ahead. In the medina, stalls sell bissara broad-bean soup, grilled brochettes and bread baked in communal wood-fired ovens that neighbourhoods still share. Festivals: Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, in early summer, Fes Festival of Sufi Culture, in spring, Ramadan evenings in the medina, dates moving yearly, Moussem of Moulay Idriss II, in the medina. Museums: Dar Batha Museum — Fes crafts, ceramics and zellige, Nejjarine Museum of Wooden Arts and Crafts, Bou Inania and Al-Attarine madrasas, Ibn Danan synagogue, in the mellah.

Practical Info

Safety: Fes is a safe city for visitors and the realistic issues are hassle and navigation rather than crime. Unofficial guides will offer to lead you when you look lost, sometimes insistently and occasionally by steering you somewhere you did not ask to go; a firm, friendly refusal works, and official guides carry identification. In the lanes, keep to the wall when you hear a handcart or donkey coming, since there is no room to negotiate. The medina is poorly lit after dark and easy to misread, so returning by a route you already know is sensible. Summer heat is significant in a city with little shade, and old riads are cold in winter. Language: Moroccan Arabic is the everyday language and Amazigh is official alongside standard Arabic. French is very widely spoken in business, signage, hotels and restaurants, and will carry you through almost any interaction. English is common in the tourist trade of the medina but thins out quickly beyond it. Currency: The Moroccan dirham, a closed currency you generally obtain on arrival rather than beforehand, and which you should spend down or reconvert before leaving. Cards work in hotels, the larger restaurants and the Ville Nouvelle, but the medina runs on cash — for crafts, food stalls, guides, porters and taxis. Bank ATMs are plentiful in the new town and sparse inside the walls, so draw cash before going in for the day.
Travel Overview

Fes is the oldest of Morocco's imperial cities and the least altered, and the single fact that defines a visit is that its medina has no cars in it. Fès el-Bali is the largest car-free urban area on earth: a walled medieval city of some nine thousand lanes where goods still move by handcart and donkey because nothing else fits, and where the street plan has not been rationalised for the convenience of anyone. You will get lost. That is not a failure of preparation, it is the actual experience, and the lanes are short enough and the people helpful enough that being lost is rarely more than briefly disorienting. Inside are things that exist nowhere else in this concentration: Al-Qarawiyyin, founded in 859 and generally described as the oldest continuously operating university in the world; madrasas whose courtyards are covered floor to ceiling in carved cedar, stucco and zellige mosaic; and the Chouara tanneries, where hides are still worked in stone vats of dye, viewed from the terraces of the leather shops that surround them. What separates Fes from Morocco's other great cities is that its crafts are a working economy rather than a display — the tilework, brass, weaving and leather are made here for use. Add the country's most serious kitchen, and three days is a reasonable minimum. Spring and autumn are the seasons: this is an inland city, hot in high summer and genuinely cold in winter.

Discover Fes

The walled old city is the reason to come and it is best approached as a place to be inside rather than a checklist. Enter at Bab Boujloud, the blue-tiled gate, and the two main arteries funnel you down through the souks; step off them and the lanes narrow to shoulder width, tunnel under houses and end without warning. Handcarts and donkeys still carry everything, and the cry warning you to flatten against a wall is worth learning to react to. Practical advice that actually helps: note the nearest gate rather than trying to hold a route, keep your accommodation's name and lane written down, and accept that your phone's map will be defeated by the overhangs.

Frequently asked questions

They are genuinely different, not interchangeable. Fes is older, larger as a medieval fabric, far less altered, and its crafts remain a working economy rather than a show — but it has fewer of the comforts built around visitors, and it asks more of you. Marrakech is more immediately enjoyable, better supplied with hotels, restaurants and nightlife, and quicker to reach from most of Europe, though its medina is smaller and its atmosphere more staged. If you want to be entertained, Marrakech. If you want to walk into a functioning medieval city and get lost in it, Fes — and if you can, do both.

Yes, and no. Fès el-Bali has thousands of lanes with no rational plan, they change width without warning, and phone maps struggle where houses arch over the street. Getting lost is the standard experience rather than a mistake. What makes it manageable is that the medina is walled and the gates are the fixed points: note the nearest one, keep your riad's name and lane written down, and ask a shopkeeper rather than someone who approaches you. An official guide for the first half-day is worth the money, mostly because you leave with a mental map that makes the rest of your stay easier.

Not the prayer hall — it is a working mosque and closed to non-Muslims, as religious buildings in Morocco generally are. You can see a good deal from the lanes around it, where several doorways give framed views into the courtyard, and the restored library has opened to visitors under arrangements worth checking locally when you arrive. What is fully open, and arguably more rewarding to walk through, are the historic madrasas: Bou Inania and Al-Attarine both let you stand in courtyards worked in carved cedar, chiselled stucco and zellige on every surface.