The Most Authentic City in Morocco

Founded in 789 by Moulay Idriss I, considered the religious and cultural capital of Morocco and known as the most authentic city in North Africa, Fès is the oldest of the imperial cities and, in urban-planning terms, is made up of three districts that differ from one another in the type and character of both their streets and their buildings, named Fès el Bali (with the Medina), Fès el Jedid (with the Royal Palace and the Jewish Mellah) and the New City (with the administrative offices). The first two are of ancient origin and enclosed within the walls, while the third was built by the French in 1920, with Western urban-planning features.

First of all, some tips. For a good visit it is useful to hire a local guide, whom you can usually find waiting for clients in the lobby of almost every hotel or by contacting the Tourist Office in Place de la Résistance. The advantages are many: starting with the visit to the Medina, where without a guide you would easily get lost and see very little; being able to visit the city without wasting time looking for the most interesting spots; and, since guides usually use their own car, the chance to save time and money moving around inside and around the outskirts of the city. Moreover, having a guide also helps you avoid the pestering of street vendors. Our guide for one day's assistance, including the use of his car, cost 40 $, which I consider money well spent.

I recommend choosing an authorised guide (they have a special badge with a photograph), since the Police are not very gentle with illegal guides and you could find yourself in unpleasant situations.

If you are in Fès on an organised trip, the hotel will certainly be included in the tour package and they usually offer the Hotel Sheraton or the Hotel Palais Jamai. If you are travelling on your own, I suggest not wasting money on those hotels (a night costs at least 125/150 euros (and you never have time to use the available services, which you pay for anyway, such as tennis, gym, solarium, golf and an affiliated riding school, etc.)) since there are other good hotels, with essential services, at a clearly lower cost. We stayed at the Hotel Mounia (to be honest, we didn't exactly look for it, we stopped at the first one that appealed to us, and we got lucky), located in the New City at 60 Rue Asilah (tel. 05-5650771), a three-star, comfortable rooms, appropriate services, courteous staff, and an excellent breakfast, with prices from 20 to 35 euros.

What you save on the hotel you can spend better by shopping in the Medina.

Visiting Fès el Bali is an experience I would dare call unique, and which I recently had the chance to do for the second time, putting my first experience to good use. A great Medina in which the inhabitants, about 100,000 (of whom 30,000 are craftsmen), live their daily lives for themselves and only marginally for tourism, a real and genuine environment that has nothing in common with the medinas of Marrakech, Casablanca or Rabat, where the tourist side has by now taken over. A Medina with houses built one against the other, with alleys so narrow that no motor traffic is possible, and where all transport is done on foot or by pushing small carts or, much more often, on the backs of mules.

A city where you can learn about old traditions, experience the feeling of living in the Arab world and, among the women carrying bread to bake in the public oven, the bustle of the inhabitants, the colours and the scents, it really feels like going back in history. A city within a city, formed from the outset by two districts (Fès Al Andalous initially inhabited by refugees from Andalusia and Fès Al Quaraouiyin originally inhabited by refugees from Kairouan in Tunisia), themselves divided into many craftsmen's souks, the best known of which is certainly that of the tanners, with the large round vats full of colours in which the hides are dyed. Thanks to the guide (and here his importance is confirmed) we managed to get onto the terrace (accessible only by passing through shops and displays), from which the classic photos that have gone around the world were taken.

The smell was very strong but equally strong was the satisfaction of seeing the tanners at work live, the protagonists of the photo that is almost a symbol of Fès. 90% of the shops in the Medina serve the locals and perhaps for this reason you can make good purchases, at excellent prices, of clothing items (obviously of local style), silver (necklaces, bracelets, brooches and jewellery in general), leather (especially bags), perfumes, spices and ceramic items. As always happens in Arab countries, haggling is essential to get a reasonable price.

In the visit to the Medina, a visit is deserved by the Medersa Bou Inania (the most important Quranic school in Fès), the Medersa Attarin (a masterpiece of Merinid art), the Quaraouiyine Mosque (the main one in Fès) and the university of the same name (the oldest in the world). Pay particular attention to the Souk el Attarine (grocers' shops), the Souk el Henne (beauty-product shops), Sidi Youssef street (mosque and Andalusian quarter), Nejjarine square (cabinetmakers' shops) with a beautiful fountain decorated with ceramics and the Wood Museum, and the Dar Batha, an old building built at the beginning of the last century by the Sultan Moulay El Hassan which has now been turned into a museum of the arts and traditions of the Fès region.

If during lunchtime you are visiting the Medina, I suggest a stop at the Restaurant Al Fassia at 21 rue Salaj, near Batha Square, an excellent restaurant offering typically local cuisine with no concessions to tourist-style reinterpretations.

In Fès el Jedid is the Royal Palace, with a golden and very well-decorated portal, and its gardens that extend over an area of 70 hectares, but the whole thing is closed to the public even though the king is almost never there. Here is also what was once the Jewish quarter called the Mellah, a group of fairly modest and I would even say run-down buildings, now inhabited by Muslims.

The third district of Fès, the one built by the French, has a completely different appearance, with a large central avenue around which the new city has spread with wide streets and spacious squares, and where the main public buildings, the big hotels, restaurants, shops, cafés and bars are found; in short, a very tidy residential district but lacking any historical or artistic interest.

Setting aside the organised tour, the best way to get to Fès from Italy is to reach Casablanca with one of the Royal Air Maroc and Alitalia flights from Milan or Rome (cost around 390 euros). Fès is about 220 kilometres from Casablanca and can be reached both by train (about 4 hours) and by bus (the timetable says 4 hours, but allow an extra hour. Ours took 6, but the bus had had a brake problem). There is also a flight connection from Casablanca in the evening, but I don't think it's worth considering.

Before leaving, you can get more information from the offices of the Moroccan National Tourist Board in Milan, at via Larga, 23, tel. 02 58303756, fax 02 58303970, E-mail: turismo.marocco@tin.it - The Embassy of Mo