Fes el-Bali

Come in through Bab Boujloud, under zellij of blue and jade, and Fes el-Bali closes over you: covered lanes, sudden courtyards, a minaret sighted and then lost behind a wall. Nearly a quarter of a city of more than a million people still lives in here, and the old town owes very little to the outside world beyond electricity and visitors.

Al-Qarawiyyin opened its doors in 859, and Guinness World Records still lists it as the oldest existing and continually operating educational institution anywhere on earth. The Chouara pits are the medina's other constant: more than five hundred master tanners work them every day, the run from rawhide to finished leather takes about thirty days, and the only way to watch is to climb through a leather shop onto its balcony. Fez took in families expelled from southern Spain and built Morocco's first mellah in the fifteenth century, which is why the pastilla here is dusted with icing sugar over meat and cinnamon. Climb to the Merenid tombs after the lanes begin to empty; the whole medina finally acquires a shape, which is something the lanes themselves refuse to give you.