Fez

A place with its own rhythm.

Fez is the Morocco that other Moroccan cities measure themselves against. Founded in the late eighth century and capital for long stretches of the country's history, it holds the oldest continuously running university in the world at al-Qarawiyyin, founded in 859 by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri. Fes el-Bali, the old medina, is the largest car-free urban area on earth. Nine thousand lanes, some barely shoulder-width, and no vehicle that is not a mule or a handcart. Getting lost is not a risk here, it is the method: every wrong turn opens onto a workshop, a fountain, a doorway of carved cedar and painted plaster. The Chouara tanneries have worked the same way since the eleventh century — stone vats of dye and lime, hides turned by hand, the colours visible from the leather shops above. The madrasas of Bou Inania and al-Attarine are small and overwhelming, every surface carved, tiled or written on. Fez is less polished than Marrakech and more demanding. Travellers who give it two days leave frustrated; those who give it four tend to call it the best thing they did in Morocco.