Fez el-Bali Medina
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Morocco.
Read MoreErg Chebbi Dunes, Merzouga
A closer look at one of Morocco's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreChefchaouen's Blue Streets
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Morocco.
Read MoreMorocco is a country of thresholds. Step through a nondescript door in the Fez medina and find a riad opening onto a courtyard tiled in zellige, a fountain murmuring beneath orange trees. Drive four hours from Marrakech and the High Atlas gives way to the dunes of Merzouga, where Berber families still guide camel trains at dusk. I have gotten deliberately lost in the medinas of Fez and Marrakech more times than I can count, trusting that a boy with a cart or a tea seller would eventually point me home, and they always did. Morocco rewards this kind of surrender. It is a place where Islamic, Berber, and French influences layer without quite blending, and where the call to prayer, the scent of mint tea, and the clang of coppersmiths' hammers form a soundtrack no recording does justice.
Chapter One
Fez, the Medieval Medina
Fez el-Bali is the largest car-free urban area in the world, a labyrinth of nine thousand alleys that has functioned continuously since the ninth century. I hired a guide not to be safe but to be efficient; without one, an afternoon can evaporate simply trying to find your way back to a riad you swear you passed twice already. The Chouara Tannery is the postcard image, men working leather in stone vats of dye under the open sky, but I found more truth in the quieter workshops: a coppersmith's son learning his father's trade, a woman weaving thread into intricate mendil scarves. Fez does not perform history for tourists; it simply continues living inside it.
“Morocco does not reveal itself to you; you have to earn the wrong turn first.”
Chapter Two
The Sahara's Edge at Merzouga
The drive from Marrakech to Merzouga crosses the Tizi n'Tichka pass through the High Atlas before the landscape flattens into rock, then finally into the orange dunes of Erg Chebbi. I arrived by camel at sunset with a Berber family who has led these routes for generations, and slept in a simple desert camp under a sky so unpolluted by light that the Milky Way looked almost artificial in its clarity. In the morning, a young guide named Youssef showed me how to read wind patterns in the sand's ripples, a small skill passed down rather than taught in any school. The silence of the Sahara at 4am is its own kind of loud.
The Short List
Do not miss in Morocco
At a glance
Morocco in numbers
- Capital
- Rabat
- Language
- Arabic and Amazigh (French widely spoken)
- Currency
- Moroccan Dirham
- Best time
- March to May and September to November
Did you know
Morocco was the first country to formally recognize the independence of the United States, in 1777.