Imperial Cities of Morocco

Your driver meets you inside the terminal and the transfer to the medina takes about fifteen minutes. The last stretch is on foot through the derb, because cars do not reach most riads, and a porter takes the bags.

Nothing is scheduled. If you arrive early, mint tea on the roof and a first walk towards the Koutoubia, whose minaret is the one landmark you can navigate by from anywhere in the old city.

In the evening, Jemaa el Fna. The food stalls go up around six and the square becomes something between a market, a theatre and a kitchen. Eat at a numbered stall, not at a restaurant terrace with a view of the stalls.

A full day with a private guide, beginning at the Koutoubia while it is still cool. The minaret was finished around 1195 and became the model for the Giralda in Seville and the Hassan Tower you will see in Rabat on day four, which is the thread that holds this whole journey together.

The Bahia Palace in the late morning, built for a grand vizier who had been born a slave, then the Saadian Tombs, sealed in 1603 and lost until an aerial survey rediscovered them in 1917. Lunch in a courtyard, then the souks: the dyers, the coppersmiths, the carpet quarter.

In the afternoon, the Jardin Majorelle and the Berber Museum, or Le Jardin Secret inside the medina if you would rather not drive. Both are included; your guide will read the heat and the crowds and tell you which works better that day.

An early start if you want the balloon. Lift off is at first light over the Haouz plain with the Atlas on one side and the palm groves on the other, and you are back at the riad by mid morning for a second breakfast.

The cooking class runs late morning into lunch. You start at the market choosing what you are going to cook, then work in a riad kitchen with a dada, the Moroccan women who cook professionally in private houses. You eat what you made, which is usually better than it has any right to be.

The afternoon is deliberately empty. Most people use it for a hammam, which after two days of walking is the correct decision. We book it when you tell us you want it rather than in advance.

We leave after breakfast and take the A3 north across the Rehamna plain. It is the easiest driving of the journey and the landscape changes steadily from red earth to green coastal farmland.

Rabat in the afternoon with a local guide. The Kasbah des Oudayas first, a twelfth century fortress above the mouth of the Bou Regreg with an Andalusian garden inside and lanes painted blue and white, then the Hassan Tower, a minaret abandoned half built in 1199 when the sultan died, standing over two hundred unfinished columns.

If there is light left, the Chellah: a Roman town that became a Merinid necropolis, now half overgrown, with storks nesting on top of the minaret. It is the strangest and best thing in Rabat and almost nobody goes.

North east through Khemisset and into the Zerhoun hills, which are covered in olives and look more like Tuscany than anything else in Morocco.

Volubilis in the late morning. It was a Roman provincial capital of perhaps twenty thousand people, abandoned by the eighth century and quarried for Meknes in the seventeenth, which is why the arch still stands and the houses do not. The mosaics are in situ, uncovered, in the floors of the houses they were made for. The House of Orpheus and the Dionysus floor are the two to stand in front of properly.

Then Moulay Idriss, the hill town holding the tomb of the man who founded the Moroccan state, and down to Meknes for the night. Dinner on a terrace facing the Bab Mansour gate is the thing to do here.

The morning in Meknes. Moulay Ismail ruled for fifty five years and spent most of them building: forty kilometres of walls, the Heri es Souani granary with its vaulted chambers and underground water system, and stables said to have held twelve thousand horses. Much of it is roofless now after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which makes it better rather than worse.

Bab Mansour, finished in 1732, is the most elaborate gate in Morocco and its architect was reportedly executed for admitting he could have done better. The medina behind it is a working one with almost no tourism, which after Marrakech is a noticeable change of air.

An hour east to Fes in the afternoon, arriving with enough time to walk down into the medina before dinner and begin to understand the scale of what you are about to spend two days in.

Fes el Bali has around nine thousand lanes and no cars, and a guide here is not a luxury. Ours are from the city. We start at the Bou Inania Medersa, a fourteenth century Merinid college with carved cedar, stucco and zellige on every surface, and the water clock opposite that nobody has fully explained.

The Chouara tanneries in the late morning, from a terrace above, where hides have been worked in stone vats with pigeon droppings and lime since the eleventh century. You are handed mint to hold under your nose and you will need it. Then the Attarine Medersa, the Nejjarine fountain and the carpenters’ square.

Al Qarawiyyin in the afternoon, founded in 859 by Fatima al Fihri and recognised as the oldest continuously operating degree granting university in the world. Non Muslims cannot enter the prayer hall but you can see into the courtyard from several doorways, and the library next door has been restored and is extraordinary.

Motorway west through Meknes and Rabat to the coast. We time the arrival for the mosque, because the guided interior visits run at fixed hours and the last one is early.

The Hassan II Mosque was finished in 1993, holds twenty five thousand people inside and another eighty thousand on the terrace, and a third of it stands over the Atlantic. The minaret is 210 metres, the roof opens, the floor is heated, and the ablution hall in the basement with its lotus fountains is the part most visitors never get shown. Our guided visit includes it.

The rest of the afternoon in Casablanca: the Art Deco quarter around Boulevard Mohammed V, which is the best concentration of 1920s and 1930s architecture in Africa, and dinner somewhere on the corniche.

A transfer timed to your flight. Mohammed V is Morocco’s main international hub and the drive out is straightforward, but we build a margin because the check in queues can be long at peak hours.

If you have a late flight there is time for the Habous quarter, a 1920s French built neighbourhood in Moroccan style with the best bookshops and pastry in the city, or the Jewish Museum, which is the only one of its kind in the Arab world.

If you would rather keep going, this journey extends naturally north to Tangier and Chefchaouen, or south from Marrakech to the Sahara. Tell us and we will cost it on your dates.