Fès-Meknès

Meknes is the imperial city that gets skipped, and the reason is proximity rather than quality — it sits close enough to its more famous neighbour that itineraries treat it as optional. It was the capital under a seventeenth-century sultan who built on a scale intended to intimidate, and what survives is monumental in a way nothing else in Morocco quite is: enormous gateways, kilometres of high walls, and vast utilitarian structures including granaries and stables built with cathedral-like vaulting to hold grain and horses for an army. The medina is smaller than the great one nearby, considerably easier to navigate, much less pressured commercially, and cheaper. For a traveller who found the famous medina overwhelming, this is the same civilisation at a manageable scale, and it is a genuinely better first medina for anyone nervous about getting lost.

On a hillside above the plain stand the remains of a Roman provincial city — the best-preserved classical site in the country and the furthest south-west the empire held any real presence. What makes it worth the trip is not the scale, which is modest, but the mosaics: a considerable number remain in situ, open to the sky in the floors of the houses they were laid in, so you walk through domestic rooms and look down at the floors as their owners saw them rather than at fragments behind glass in a museum. There is a triumphal arch, a basilica, a main street and the olive presses that made the town rich, and the setting — open hillside, wheat fields, the pilgrimage town visible on the ridge opposite — does a great deal of the work. Go early or late; there is very little shade and the site is fully exposed.

A few kilometres from the Roman site, spread across two hills, sits one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Morocco — the town grown around the tomb of the founder of the country's first Arab dynasty. It is a working religious town rather than a monument, and the atmosphere is quite different from anywhere else in the region: whitewashed houses stacked steeply, a green-tiled shrine at the centre that non-Muslims do not enter, and a main square that fills and empties with the rhythm of a small town rather than a tourist one. The viewpoint above the upper hill takes in the whole arrangement and the Roman ruins across the valley. It pairs naturally with the archaeological site into one unhurried half-day, and it asks for the ordinary courtesies — modest dress, no photography of people without asking, and quiet around the shrine.

South of the cities the ground rises into a range that surprises almost everyone. The Middle Atlas is wetter and greener than the mountains further south, and it is forested — with cedar woods that include some of the oldest and largest trees in North Africa, home to troops of Barbary macaques that are entirely used to people and should still not be fed. Among the forests sit crater lakes and a landscape closer to central Europe than to anything else in the country. The regional town built in the 1920s as a hill station leans into that resemblance completely: steep pitched roofs, dormer windows, gardens, a ski slope above it and genuine snow in winter. It is the coldest inhabited place in Morocco and it feels like an elaborate joke until you have spent a night there. The whole area is a two-hour drive from the imperial cities and works well as a cool break in a hot itinerary.

Base in one of the two imperial cities and almost everything in the region is a day trip. The famous medina holds most visitors for two or three days on its own; adding the second city, the Roman site and the pilgrimage town as day trips takes the region to four or five, and a night in the Middle Atlas makes it six. If the great medina is the point of your trip, staying inside it in a converted courtyard house is the right call and the region can be reached from there. If you have found it intense, basing in the smaller imperial city and travelling in for a day is a genuinely underrated way to see the region without living in the middle of it. Where this region belongs in a whole-country route is worked out in the itinerary guide.

Spring is the region's best season without much argument — the plains are green, the Roman site is at its most photogenic, and neither the cities nor the mountains are uncomfortable. Autumn is close behind. Summer is hot in both cities and the mountains become the obvious escape, which is exactly what Moroccans use them for. Winter is the interesting one: the cities are cold and often wet and the old courtyard houses were not built for heating, so accommodation warmth is worth asking about specifically — while the Middle Atlas takes real snow and the hill station runs its ski slope. Nowhere else in the country puts a medieval medina and a snow line within two hours of each other.