Fes (Fez), Morocco

Fes — spelled Fez in American English — is a city in northern Morocco whose old quarter, Fes el-Bali, is the largest car-free urban area on earth. It has around nine thousand lanes and no grid. Two nights is the minimum, and the first morning should be guided.

Fes or Fez? One city, three spellings

You will meet all three. French-language sources write Fès, Maroc; English ones write Fez, Morocco; Moroccan signage in Latin script usually says Fes. The airport code is FEZ. They are the same place, and the confusion costs people bookings every year — check the spelling on your ticket, not the one in your guidebook.

Fez the city was founded in the late eighth century and served as the capital of Morocco on and off for a thousand years. What survives is not a restored quarter but a functioning medieval one: donkeys carrying gas bottles, a working tannery, a mosque that has held Friday prayers without a break since 859.

How many nights in Fes

Two, minimum. Three if craft interests you.

Day one is the medina with a guide — monuments in the morning, the tanneries before the light goes flat, no shopping decisions. Day two is the same medina alone, at your own speed, plus the Mellah and the ramparts. Day three is Volubilis and Meknes, or the potters.

One night in Fes is the most common mistake on a Morocco itinerary. People arrive at six, walk in unguided, get lost, get harangued, and leave the next morning saying they did not like it.

The medina: nine thousand lanes, and why day one should be guided

We say this about nowhere else in the country. Marrakech you can wander. Fes punishes wandering.

The medina is a bowl on a hillside with no straight streets, no vehicles and almost no signage. Phone GPS drifts badly between four-storey walls. Two gates matter for orientation: Bab Boujloud at the top, blue on the outside and green on the inside, and Bab Rcif in the middle, which is where a taxi can actually reach you.

A licensed guide for half a day costs a small fraction of the trip and changes it completely — not because you cannot cope, but because the value is behind doors that are invisible from the lane. Ours are licensed and we publish the numbers.

The tanneries: the mint sprig, the terrace and what comes after

Chouara is the big one, and the routine is fixed. You climb through a leather shop, somebody hands you a sprig of mint on the stairs, and you come out on a terrace above the dye pits. The mint is for the smell — pigeon droppings and lime — which is genuinely strong in July.

The terrace is free. The expectation is that you look at the bags on the way down. That is fair, and you can say no. What is not fair is being told the terrace costs money, which happens; there is no ticket.

Best light is mid-morning. In heavy rain the pits are half empty and the men are not working.

What is actually worth your time

• Bou Inania madrasa — the one religious building in the medina open to non-Muslims, and worth going inside.
• Al-Attarine madrasa — smaller, finer, less visited.
• Al-Qarawiyyin — founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri and generally counted as the oldest continuously operating university anywhere. Non-Muslims can look in through the doorways.
• The Mellah and Ibn Danan synagogue — the Jewish quarter beside the royal palace, and a part of Moroccan history most itineraries skip.
• Borj Nord — the hill fort above the city. Go at sunset, when the whole medina is laid out at once.
• The potters’ quarter, outside the walls, where the kilns still burn olive pits and the blue-and-white you see all over the country is cut, glazed and chipped into mosaic by hand.

Fes vs Marrakech

Genuinely different cities, and the choice tells you what kind of trip you want.

Fes is older, larger in its medina, more religious, more conservative and much less shaped by tourism. The craft is real work. It is harder on a first visit and it stays with people longer.

Marrakech is hotter, flatter, easier to navigate, better supplied with hotels and restaurants, and within reach of the mountains, the coast and the desert. It is the better opening city.

Most trips do both. If you only have room for one and it is your first time in the country, do Marrakech. If you have been before, do Fes.

Where to stay: medina riad or Ville Nouvelle

A riad inside the medina puts you in the middle of it, at the cost of walking your luggage in from the nearest gate — sometimes ten minutes, occasionally behind a porter with a handcart. It is worth it.

The Ville Nouvelle has parking, larger hotels and taxis at the door, and sits a fifteen-minute drive from Bab Boujloud. Choose it if mobility is a problem or you are arriving very late.

Eating in Fes

Fes has its own kitchen, not a generic Moroccan one. Pastilla — pigeon or chicken under sugared filo — is a Fassi dish. So is khlii, preserved meat, usually with eggs at breakfast. Bissara, thick broad bean soup under olive oil and cumin, is what the city eats on a cold morning for the price of a coffee.

Eat one meal in a restored riad and the rest at street level. The gap in quality is much smaller than the gap in price.

Day trips from Fes

• Volubilis and Meknes in one day. Roman mosaics still lying in the ground an hour west, then the gates and granaries of Meknes. A full, satisfying day.
• Chefchaouen, as an overnight. Four hours each way is too much for a day trip, whatever the tour desks say. Go up, sleep there, come back. The timings are in our Chefchaouen day trip guide, and we run it as an overnight from Fes.
• Ifrane and the cedar forest. Alpine architecture, Barbary macaques, snow in winter. Odd, and worth it.

Getting to Fez, Morocco

Route	Realistic time
Casablanca → Fes, by train	4h
Tangier → Fes, by train	3h 30
Fes → Chefchaouen, by road	4h
Fes → Merzouga, by road	8h

Casablanca to Fes, Morocco’s most common arrival route, runs from the airport station without changing trains in the city. The Fes–Marrakech train is direct but long. Fes-Saïss airport takes flights from several European cities.

The route we run most is the reverse: Marrakech to Fes across the Sahara in three days, arriving from the desert rather than from a platform. Fes also anchors our imperial cities and Chefchaouen week.

When to visit Fes

March to May, and late September to November.

Fes sits inland at about 400 m with no coast to moderate it, so the seasons are sharper than most people expect from Morocco. Summer is dry heat in the high thirties, and the medina — stone, no shade, no air moving — holds it well past sunset. Winter is cold and genuinely wet: December to February brings rain, and the lanes run with it, because a medieval drainage system is exactly as good as it sounds.

The compensation is that winter is empty. If you can tolerate rain and pack a coat, January in Fes gives you madrasas with nobody in them.

Ramadan changes the rhythm rather than closing the city. Workshops keep shorter hours, restaurants in the medina open after sunset, and the evening streets are busier than at any other time of year.

Is Fes safe?

Yes. The medina is safe to walk, including in the evening on the main arteries, and Moroccan cities have very little street crime aimed at visitors.

The hustler question is the real one. Unofficial guides work the gates, and the standard opening is that the way you are heading is closed, or that there is a Berber market on today. There is no market. Say la, shukran once and keep going. There is more in safety in Morocco, and in culture and etiquette for how to behave around the mosques you will be walking past all day.

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Fes is the city we most often advise people not to shorten. The rest of the country is on our destinations page — tell us how long you have and we will say honestly whether it fits.

Plan your trip with Hajar.