Fez or Fes - The World's Oldest Living Medieval City
If I had to choose a single Moroccan city that best represents the depth and complexity of what this country is and has been, I would choose Fez. Not Marrakesh, which is more spectacular and more immediately pleasurable. Not Tangier, which is more cosmopolitan and more literary. Fez, because it is the oldest, the most complete, the most authentic, and because it contains — the world’s biggest, most complete and most authentic medina — a living record of Islamic urban civilisation that has no real parallel anywhere in the world.
It really is like stepping into the pages of ‘A Thousand and One Arabian Nights’.
Let me guide you around Fez and at it’s centre, the huge medieval medina, which goes by the name of Fès el-Bali.
You can zoom in and out on the map and click on the various elements for more information.
It is amazing, when you step foot into it’s huge medina, it is as if you have stepped back 500 years, to medieval times where tradesmen sell their exotic handcrafted goods. The medina is a labyrinth of small passageways lined with stalls and small shops, some just rooms filled with the most amazing handmade crafts. The medina is divided into different areas, each trade has it’s own area of the medina, where traders compete vigorously with each other for your custom.
And the traders are persistent, I have been followed through the medina by a trader selling traditional sandals that I glanced at in passing. He followed me for a good fifteen minutes, I wasn’t really that interested in the sandals, but we haggled and I got such a good price that I bought them. I’m glad I did, they were the best sandals I ever owned!
I found the medina quite overwhelming, the first time I visited, all your senses become hyper vigilant. It was like stepping into the fairytale world of the Arabian Nights.
It was amazing for a person like me who works with traditional artisans, to step back into a time where everything was handcrafted by traditional tradesmen.
I have been to Fez many times over the last thirty years, initially to source new products for my fair trade company One World is Enough, and subsequently because I loved wandering around the medina, letting myself get lost and finding new bits that I had never seen before. Back in the day you would worry about never finding your way out again, but now Google maps is there to save us!
You can spend a week in Fez and at the end of it feel that you have only begun to understand it. The medina has over nine thousand lanes. The city was, in the twelfth century, the largest in the world. It has been a centre of Islamic scholarship for twelve centuries and a centre of craft production for nearly as long. It is also, on the first morning, genuinely overwhelming.
Twelve Centuries of Civilisation
Fez was founded in 789 AD by Moulay Idriss I, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who had fled the political violence of the Abbasid caliphate and established a small kingdom in northern Morocco. His son, Idriss II, made Fez the capital and gave it the institutional structure — mosques, markets, administrative systems — that would sustain it through a dozen subsequent dynasties.
The city’s cultural and intellectual formation happened quickly. In the early ninth century, two waves of refugees arrived and transformed it. First came several thousand families from Córdoba, expelled following a rebellion, who settled on the western bank of the Oued Fes and established the Andalusian Quarter. Then came families from Kairouan in Tunisia, the great centre of North African Islamic scholarship, who settled on the eastern bank. These two communities — Andalusian and Kairouani — brought with them the intellectual traditions, the craft skills, and the urban culture that made Fez what it became.
In 859 AD, Fatima al-Fihri — the daughter of a wealthy Kairouani merchant — used her inheritance to found the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque and university. This institution is now recognised by UNESCO and the Guinness World Records as the oldest continuously operating degree-granting university in the world, predating Oxford by three centuries and Bologna by more than two. For over a thousand years, scholars from across the Islamic world have come to Fez to study, and the intellectual prestige this created defined the city’s identity as the spiritual and educational capital of Morocco.
Under the Almoravids in the eleventh century, the city’s walls were unified and extended. Under the Almohads it was briefly eclipsed by Marrakesh but recovered its position. Under the Merinids in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it reached its greatest magnificence: the Merinid sultans built the medersas, the fondouks, the great gates and the Fez el-Jdid — the new city — that remain among the finest achievements of Moroccan architecture. This is the Fez that visitors encounter today, largely unchanged in its essential character since the fourteenth century.
Fes el-Bali: The Old City
The medina of Fez — Fes el-Bali, the old Fez — is the largest car-free urban area on earth. Over 150,000 people live within its walls. Its nine thousand-plus lanes form a medieval labyrinth that Google Maps handles poorly and human guides handle perfectly. Mules and donkeys are the only wheeled transport — a shout of balak! means one is coming and you should flatten yourself against the wall — and the sounds of the city are accordingly pre-industrial: the hammer of the coppersmith, the shuttle of the weaver, the call to prayer from dozens of minarets.
The main entrance is Bab Boujloud — the Blue Gate — a triple archway of zellige tilework, blue on the medina side and green (the colour of Islam) on the city side, rebuilt in 1913 on an ancient foundation. Passing through it, you enter the two main arteries of the medina: Talaa Kebira and Talaa Seghira, the upper and lower streets, both running downhill through the commercial heart of the city toward the Al-Qarawiyyin quarter. The lanes on either side of these arteries — narrower, quieter, darker — contain the workshops, the residential quarters, the mosques and the hidden riads that make up the texture of life in Fez.
The Bou Inania Medersa
Within two minutes of Bab Boujloud, on Talaa Kebira, is the Bou Inania Medersa — the finest piece of Merinid architecture that non-Muslims are permitted to enter, and one of the most beautiful interiors in Morocco. Built between 1351 and 1356 by the Merinid sultan Abu Inan Faris, it functioned as a residential theological college, housing students who came to study at the Al-Qarawiyyin.
The courtyard is a composition of extraordinary refinement: the lower walls tiled in geometric zellige, the middle register in carved stucco calligraphy, the upper level in cedarwood screens of interlocking geometry. In the centre, a marble basin reflects the sky. The proportions are perfect — human in scale, but imposing in the cumulative effect of the decoration. I have stood in this courtyard many times and never found it less than astonishing. What strikes me most is the coherence of it: every element — tilework, stucco, wood, marble, water — is working toward the same end, and that end is beauty as a form of devotion.
The Chouara Tannery
The tanneries of Fez are its most-photographed sight, and they are famous because they are genuinely extraordinary. The Chouara Tannery — the largest of the three, operating near the Oued Fes since the city’s foundation — is a collection of circular stone vats arranged in a pattern that, seen from the surrounding leather-shop terraces, resembles an enormous artist’s palette. The vats contain natural dyes — poppy for red, indigo for blue, saffron for yellow, henna for orange — and the white liquids of the preparatory process, a solution that includes quicklime and pigeon droppings, which gives the tannery its confrontational smell.
The leather is processed by hand, exactly as it has been for a thousand years. Hides are soaked and softened, then transferred to the dye vats, where workers stand knee-deep in colour, treading the leather to ensure even absorption. The resulting leather — supple, richly coloured, developed over days of process — is sold to workshops across the medina, where craftsmen make the bags, slippers, coats and cushion covers that stock the leather shops of Fez and, eventually, shops across the world.
The ecological impact of the tanneries is significant and complicated. Chromium, introduced in the nineteenth century to aid the tanning process, is toxic, and the Oued Fes downstream of the tanneries carries heavy pollution. Projects to relocate the tanning industry to a purpose-built facility outside the medina have been discussed for years and have never been implemented, partly because of the economic disruption this would cause and partly because of the symbolic importance of the tanneries to the city’s identity.
Tannery visiting: You can view the Chouara from the terraces of the surrounding leather shops, which provide access in exchange for the opportunity — not obligation — to buy. Shops will offer you a sprig of mint to hold to your nose against the smell. Accept it. Go on a warm day when the dyes are most vivid.
The Al-Qarawiyyin and the Scholar’s Quarter
The Al-Qarawiyyin mosque and university, founded by Fatima al-Fihri in 859 AD, is closed to non-Muslims, and you will not see its great courtyard or its library of ancient manuscripts. But the building can be glimpsed through its many doorways, and the quarter surrounding it — the Al-Attarine souk, the Seffarine square of the coppersmiths, the shrine of Moulay Idriss II — constitutes the intellectual and spiritual heart of the city.
The Al-Attarine Medersa, which you can enter, stands immediately adjacent to the mosque and is its architectural equal. Built between 1323 and 1325 during the reign of the Merinid sultan Abu Said, it was the reception hall for scholars arriving to study at the Qarawiyyin — a place of welcome and orientation at the threshold of the greatest university in the Islamic world. Its courtyard, though smaller than the Bou Inania, is perhaps even more refined: the stucco more delicate, the cedarwood more intricate, the proportions more intimate.
From the roof of the Al-Attarine, on a clear day, you can see directly into the courtyard of the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque — a view available nowhere else to a non-Muslim visitor, and worth the effort of finding the staircase.
Eating in Fez
The cuisine of Fez is the most refined in Morocco and widely considered the most refined in the Maghreb. The city claims the invention of pastilla — the layered pie of pigeon (or increasingly chicken), egg, almonds and spices, encased in warka pastry as fine as tissue paper, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. The combination sounds improbable and tastes extraordinary. Any riad or restaurant serious about Fassi cuisine will serve a version; the best versions take a day to prepare.
Click here to read our Moroccan Food Guide
The harira — the thick, tomato-based soup with lentils and chickpeas — is another Fassi staple, served throughout the medina and at its best in the small restaurants around the Rcif quarter. Mrouzia — lamb slow-cooked with almonds, raisins and spice in a honey-sweetened sauce — is another dish that could only have come from this culinary tradition: patient, complex, the kind of cooking that reflects centuries of refinement.
Allow three days in Fez, minimum. Use the first day to get lost, to absorb the scale and the strangeness of the medina. Use the second to see the specific places — the medersas, the tanneries, the quarter of the Al-Qarawiyyin — ideally with a guide who can explain what you are looking at. Use the third to go back to revisit the places that stayed with you, at a pace of your own choosing. The city is inexhaustible, but three days is enough to begin to love it.