This is your destination guide for Morocco.
This is your destination guide for Fes & Meknes
📍 Part of MoroccoThe oldest working medina in the Arab world, a quieter imperial city beside it, and Roman mosaics still lying where they were laid.
The reality: Fes el-Bali is the world's largest car-free urban area — around 9,000 alleys inside the walls, founded in the ninth century, and still occupied by the people whose families have run its workshops for generations. Al-Qarawiyyin, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri, is recognised as the oldest continuously operating degree-granting university in the world, and it is not a museum: it's a mosque and a working library on a normal street. Delivery here still arrives on a mule, and that's the reason the medina survived.
Fes doesn't perform for visitors the way Marrakech does. It's harder to read, less immediately pretty, and much more rewarding once you stop trying to navigate and start following the downhill flow of the alleys — which, since the medina sits in a bowl, always eventually gets you somewhere.
An hour west, Meknes is the imperial city nobody plans a trip around: enormous seventeenth-century gates, granaries built to feed twelve thousand horses, half the crowds and two-thirds the prices. Beyond it are Volubilis, where the Roman mosaics are still in the floors they were laid in, and Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, a white hill town around the tomb of the man who founded Morocco's first dynasty. It makes a full, unhurried day.
A ninth-century city with no cars in it, laid out downhill, and best entered from the top.
Come in through Bab Boujloud — blue on the outside, green on the inside — and take Talaa Kebira, the artery that runs downhill for a kilometre and a half past food stalls and into the heart of it.
The two big medersas, Bou Inania and Al-Attarine, are fourteenth-century Merenid student colleges and the best carved cedar and stucco you'll see anywhere in Morocco. Both are open, both are small, and each takes twenty minutes.
Al-Qarawiyyin itself is closed to non-Muslims, but its restored library entrance and the doorways along its walls show you most of what there is to see.
Nejjarine Square has a cedar-and-tile fountain and a woodwork museum behind it. Seffarine, the metalworkers' square, tells you where you are by noise before a map does. Place R'cif at the bottom is where taxis and buses actually reach.
For scale, climb to the Merenid Tombs or Borj Nord on the north hill at the end of the day: the whole bowl of the medina below you, and the call to prayer starting from a hundred minarets slightly out of sync.
Fes is where the crafts still happen at scale — and the workshops are the point of the city.
The Chouara tannery is the image everyone knows: stone vats of dye and lime, hides worked by hand in a process that has barely changed in a thousand years.
You view it from the terraces of the leather shops around it. They hand you a sprig of mint at the door, and the smell is exactly as advertised. Nobody charges an entrance fee — there's an expectation you'll look at the shop on the way down, and a firm, friendly no is fine.
More interesting, and much less visited: the zellige workshops, where the geometric tilework is still cut piece by piece from fired blanks with a sharpened hammer, glazed side down, by men who learned it at fourteen.
The potteries at Aïn Nokbi outside the walls do zellige and blue-and-white Fassi ceramics together, and most will let you walk the whole process. In the medina, Seffarine hammers brass and copper in the open, and the weaving cooperatives near the tanneries still work cactus silk and cotton on wooden looms.
One over-built imperial capital, one Roman town, one white hill of pilgrimage — all within an hour of each other.
Meknes was Moulay Ismail's capital for fifty-five years, and he built it like a man who expected to live forever. Bab Mansour is one of the largest gates in North Africa and faces a square that still runs as a market; Heri es-Souani is a granary and stable complex of vaulted arches that fed twelve thousand horses.
His mausoleum is one of the few working Moroccan shrines non-Muslims may enter. The medina is compact, cheap, and refreshingly uninterested in you.
Volubilis, 33 km north, was the Roman provincial town at the edge of Mauretania Tingitana. Its mosaic floors — Orpheus, the labours of Hercules, a very smug Bacchus — are still in situ under the open sky, which is what makes it different from a museum visit.
Moulay Idriss Zerhoun spills white and cream down two hillsides around the tomb of Morocco's founding ruler. Only open to non-Muslim overnight visitors since 2005, it's a place to eat lunch, walk up to a terrace and look — not to tick off.
Cedar forest, hill towns and thermal springs, an hour south of a city with no green in it.
Fassi cooking is the fussy, aristocratic end of Moroccan food — and Meknes is where the country's wine comes from.
Pastilla is the Fes dish: shredded pigeon or chicken, almonds and egg folded into layers of warqa pastry and dusted with cinnamon and icing sugar. Sweet-savoury, enormous, and worth ordering for two.
Beyond it, Fassi kitchens do lamb with prunes and sesame and rfissa — chicken and lentils over shredded msemen with fenugreek, the dish made for a new mother.
Breakfast is a bowl of bissara with olive oil and cumin for a few dirhams. Sweets are a serious local business: sesame chebakia, almond kaab el ghazal, and a whole street of them near Achabine.
Meknes is Morocco's wine country. The Guerrouane and Beni M'Tir hills carry most of the country's vineyards, with a handful of estates around the town open for tastings — reds and gris rosés built for the heat, and better than the reputation. Alcohol isn't sold in the medina; hotel restaurants and the ville nouvelle have it.
April to June is the best window — 22–30°C, the Meknes hills green, the Middle Atlas in flower.
The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music falls in late May or June and is the one time the medina's riads fill completely. Book early, or move your dates.
September and October are the other good stretch, with the grape harvest around Meknes.
July and August run 35–38°C. It's dry heat, but the medina is a stone bowl and it holds it well past dark.
November to March is cold and genuinely wet. Riads without heating are chilly at night, and there's snow half an hour up in the Middle Atlas.
The train is the easy way in and out: Casablanca in about four hours, Tangier in four, Marrakech in seven — and Fes to Meknes in 40 minutes for small change, running often enough that you don't plan around it. Fes–Saïss airport is 15 km out with a shuttle train link.
Inside Fes el-Bali there is no traffic at all — walking only, with mules for freight and porters for luggage.
Red petit taxis run everywhere outside the walls and to the medina gates. They're metered, cheap, and shared by default, so a driver picking up someone else en route is normal, not a scam.
For Volubilis and Moulay Idriss, a grand taxi hired for the day from Meknes runs around 500–700 dh — or take a shared one to Moulay Idriss and walk the last 45 minutes. A rental car earns its keep only if you're carrying on into the Middle Atlas.
Compare rental cars →A riad in the old city or a bed in the new one — and one practical question about luggage.
Fes el-Bali (Batha, Talaa, Ziat) — restored courtyard riads, some of them extraordinary, most at the end of an alley a car can't enter. Riads send a porter with a cart; tell them your arrival time.
Fes el-Jdid — between the old and new cities, near the royal palace gates and the mellah. Quieter, cheaper, fifteen minutes' walk to Bab Boujloud.
Ville Nouvelle — 1920s French grid: pavements, parking, bars, chain hotels. Practical rather than atmospheric.
Meknes medina — worth a night rather than a day trip if you want Volubilis at opening time. Half the price of Fes for the same standard.
Fes is the cheaper imperial city. Riads, guides and restaurants sit noticeably below Marrakech for the same standard — often 20–30% below — and Meknes is cheaper again. The one thing worth paying properly for is a licensed guide on your first morning.
Prices in 2026 dirhams (≈ 10.8 to €1). The dirham is a closed currency — change on arrival. Cash for the medina, workshops and taxis; cards in riads, the ville nouvelle and supermarkets. Museum and medersa tickets are cash at the door.
Go if you want a medieval city that still works, craftsmen who'll let you watch, and Roman mosaics with nothing between them and the sky. Skip if you want beaches, nightlife or flat ground.
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