Moulay Idriss Zerhoun

The town sits on two hillsides at the foot of Mount Zerhoun and is built almost entirely of stairs. Whitewash, green tile, alleys that turn back on themselves, and terraces every hundred metres that give you the whole thing at once, with the olive country running away below and the Roman columns of Volubilis five kilometres off across it.

Idriss I brought Islam to Morocco in the late eighth century and founded its first dynasty, and his tomb is here. Moulay Ismail built the mausoleum around it in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, deliberately, to gather the faithful, and it worked: this is now the country's most important pilgrimage site, swamped every August for the moussem. Inside the sanctuary is for Muslims; everyone else gets the green tile roofs, the courtyards and the three-arched gateway off the main square. Nearby, the Sentissi mosque carries the only cylindrical minaret in Morocco, faced in green mosaic. Until 2005 there was nowhere here for a non-Muslim to sleep, not by law but because the rule was unwritten and no lodging existed; guesthouses opened after that, and Travel and Leisure put the town fourteenth among the world's best villages in 2023.