Ultra Luxury Morocco

A private guided visit to the Hassan II Mosque first thing, before the general tours begin. It is the largest mosque in Africa, its minaret is the tallest in the world, and a third of it is built out over the water so that worshippers pray above the Atlantic. You see the prayer hall with its retractable roof, the hand carved cedar and marble, and the vast ablution hammam in the basement that almost no visitor is shown.

We leave Casablanca around midday and take the motorway north east across the plains to Fes, stopping at Meknes or Volubilis if you want a Roman afternoon, or driving straight through if you would rather have the time in the medina. You arrive at Riad Fes in the late afternoon.

Riad Fes is a Relais and Chateaux property built into a series of merchant houses on the edge of the old city, with a black marble pool in an Andalusian courtyard and a rooftop restaurant that looks over the whole medina. Dinner is there tonight, because the view at dusk with nine thousand lanes lighting up below you is worth staying in for.

Fes el Bali is the largest car free urban area on earth and the oldest continuously inhabited medieval city in the Arab world. You walk it from the Bab Boujloud end with a historian guide, starting at the Bou Inania madrasa with its carved cedar and green tiled minaret, then down through the Talaa Kebira as the street narrows and the trades change every fifty metres.

The morning covers the Kairaouine, founded in 859 by a woman named Fatima al Fihri and recognised as the oldest continually operating university in the world, then the Attarine madrasa and the mausoleum of Moulay Idriss. Lunch is in a private house rather than a restaurant. In the afternoon the Chouara tanneries, seen from a terrace above the pits, and the copper and zellige workshops in the Seffarine.

We deliberately keep the last two hours free. Fes is exhausting in the best way and most people want the riad pool and a hammam by five o clock rather than another monument.

A slow morning at Riad Fes and a last hour in the medina if you want one, then the short drive to Fes Saiss for the midday flight. Fifty minutes later you land at Menara and are in the Marrakech medina before the afternoon heat has broken.

Your Marrakech house is La Mamounia, set against the ramparts with twelve hectares of gardens that were a royal orchard long before the hotel existed. Olive walks, heated pools, four restaurants and a spa that is worth an afternoon of its own. We hold the room category with the garden view, and we book it the moment your dates are fixed, because the best rooms at this address go a long way ahead.

The evening is deliberately unplanned. Most people walk to the Jemaa el Fnaa at dusk, stay half an hour, and then eat somewhere quiet. We hold a table for you wherever you want it.

A car collects you around half past five and drives out beyond the Palmeraie to the launch field. You lift off as the sun comes up, in a private basket for your party alone, and drift over palm groves, adobe villages and dry riverbeds with the High Atlas standing white along the whole southern horizon. The flight runs about an hour and lands to a breakfast laid out in a Berber tent.

Back at the riad by ten for a swim and a rest. The afternoon is the classic Marrakech circuit done properly with a private guide: the Saadian tombs, hidden behind a wall until 1917 and lined with Carrara marble and gold leaf, the ruined Badi palace, the Bahia with its painted cedar ceilings, and the Ben Youssef madrasa, which is the finest interior in the city.

We end at the Jardin Majorelle and the Yves Saint Laurent museum next door, timed for the last entry slot when the garden empties out and the cobalt blue is at its best.

The morning starts in the food souk rather than the craft one, with a dada who has cooked in Marrakech houses since she was fifteen. You buy what the day s menu needs, which means arguing about tomatoes, smelling forty spices and learning why ras el hanout is different in every shop in the city.

Then into a private riad kitchen for three hours. You make a tagine from scratch, learn to fold a pastilla and roll couscous by hand, which almost nobody does any more, and then eat all of it on the terrace with the household. It is a honestly good lunch, not a demonstration with a token plate at the end.

The afternoon is free for the craft souks with a guide who takes no commission, or for the pool. In the evening, a private hammam and argan oil massage for your party in the riad spa, followed by dinner wherever you choose. If you want the restaurant that stops taking bookings a month out, tell us early.

A civilised departure after breakfast and a drive west through the argan forest, a landscape that exists nowhere else on earth and where goats really do climb the trees. We stop at a women s argan cooperative where the oil is still pressed by hand and the entire margin stays with the members, and you will taste the difference between the cosmetic oil and the roasted culinary one immediately.

The air changes about twenty minutes before you see the sea. Essaouira was laid out in the eighteenth century by a French architect on the bones of a Portuguese fortress, so the medina is a grid rather than a maze, the ramparts run along the Atlantic, and the whole place is white and blue and full of wind.

Heure Bleue is a 1930s mansion inside the ramparts, with a courtyard under a glass roof, a rooftop pool looking at the ocean and a screening room. Afternoon free. The harbour at six, when the blue boats come in and the gulls go mad, is the thing to see.

We leave this day deliberately empty, because by day eight of a trip like this what people need is a day with no car and no guide. Essaouira rewards that better than anywhere in Morocco. The medina is small enough to learn in a morning, the galleries are really good, and the fish grills on the port are the best lunch in the country for about eight euros.

If you would rather do something, the options we arrange most are a morning on horseback or camelback along the beach towards Diabat, a private sailing trip out past the Purple Isles, or a session with one of the gnawa musicians the town is famous for. All of it optional and all of it bookable the night before.

Dinner on the last night is at the Heure Bleue rooftop or at a table we hold for you in the medina, and either way it ends quietly. That is the intention.

Breakfast on the roof, then the drive back across the argan country to Marrakech Menara, timed to your flight with two hours of margin. If you have a late departure we can add a day room at a riad and a final hammam, which is a better use of the afternoon than an airport lounge.

Anything you bought and could not carry, we will already have shipped. Your driver walks you to the terminal doors and that is the end of it.