Fes

Fes is the medina that other medinas measure themselves against: Fes el-Bali, walled in the ninth century and hardly widened since, is nine thousand lanes on a slope, the largest car-free urban space in the world, where donkeys carry the gas cylinders and everything else — the university of al-Qarawiyyin, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri and still teaching, which makes it the oldest in the world; medersas with cedar ceilings and zellij walls, Bou Inania first among them; the tanneries of Chouara, where hides have been soaked in stone vats of pigeon droppings and dye since the eleventh century and the smell arrives before the view; fondouks, fountains, the shrine of the city's founder, and the muezzins of two hundred mosques answering each other at dusk. West of it, Fes el-Jdid holds the royal palace behind seven brass doors and the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter; on the hill above, the Merenid tombs look down on the whole bowl at sunset.

The traveller enters through Bab Boujloud, blue outside and green inside, and lets Talaa Kebira take him down — the medersa Bou Inania at the top, the fondouk and fountain of Nejjarine, the copper-beaters of Seffarine, the door of the Qarawiyyin that non-Muslims may look through but not pass, the tanneries seen from a leather-shop terrace with a sprig of mint under the nose; gets lost, which is the point, and pays a boy a few dirhams to be found again; eats pastilla and a bowl of bissara from a hole in the wall; sleeps in a riad with a courtyard and a fountain; walks up to the Merenid tombs for the last light and the call to prayer rising from the bowl; and, with a second day, sees the palace doors and the Mellah, the Batha museum and the gardens of Jnan Sbil, and takes the road to Meknes and the Roman mosaics of Volubilis.

The Guide's honesty: Fes is intense — the touts at the gate, the false guides who attach themselves and lead you to a cousin's shop, the pressure in the carpet rooms — and it rewards the traveller who is polite, unhurried and impossible to steer; a licensed guide for the first morning is money well spent, and after that the medina is yours; the tanneries are a smell and a spectacle, and the terrace 'is free' until you leave without buying — decide beforehand what you want; the medina is steep, cobbled and slippery after rain, and the donkeys have right of way; summer in the bowl reaches forty degrees; Ramadan changes the rhythm of everything and is a beautiful time to be here if you are patient; and the Qarawiyyin's closed door to non-Muslims is not an insult but a fact — the courtyard glimpsed from the threshold is enough to understand what has been taught here for eleven centuries.