You come to Fez for a city that still runs for itself, and you stay because two nights is barely enough to find its doors. Fes el Bali takes no cars, so the visit starts on foot at Bab Bou Jeloud and stays on foot until you leave.
The drive from Casablanca is about three hours east on the motorway, and it ends at the walls. Drop a pin on your phone at the gate and walk in. Within ten minutes the pin and the person holding it have lost each other.
The lanes close over your head and fork without warning. The walls are high and give nothing away, broken only by the odd studded cedar door, and the people in the lanes move fast and know exactly where they are going.
Fez shows the street a blank wall and keeps the colour for the rooms behind the door.
Some nine thousand lanes fold into a bowl under the hills, and the whole of it still works as a market and a workshop at once. A shout of balak from behind means a loaded mule is coming through. Press into a doorway and let it pass.
Come in January if you can. The light runs low and clean, the lanes thin out, and the medina is simply a city getting through its winter, shoppers in heavy coats buying cauliflowers and haggling over socks. After Marrakech, that ordinariness comes as a relief.
Fez is a meat town, which makes it hard work for a vegetarian. Tagines come with lamb or chicken, the famous pastilla is built on pigeon, and the lane grills run to kefta and liver.
The meat-free food is the food never aimed at visitors. Bissara, a thick split-pea soup finished with olive oil and cumin, is ladled out at breakfast counters and eaten standing up. Look too for maakouda, small fried potato cakes, and vegetable couscous, which is a Friday dish.
Mint tea comes with everything: green tea sweetened almost to syrup and poured from a height into a small glass.
The crafts are the other reason to come, and they are not staged. Each trade keeps to its own quarter. At Place Seffarine the coppersmiths sit in their doorways beating trays and kettles into shape, a few steps from the gate of the al-Qarawiyyin library.
A hand-planished brass kettle is the thing to carry home, and buying one takes time. The first price is never the price, the glass of tea is part of the pitch, and you are expected to walk away at least once.
A few lanes away, the carpenters' souk works cedar and fragrant thuya into small boxes with hand-set inlay. Going without a guide means nobody walks you to a cousin's shop for a cut of the sale, the best argument for finding your own way.
The Chouara tannery is worth seeing once, though it is really a leather shop with a view. You find it by the smell, and by the sellers who steer you to a terrace and hand you a sprig of mint for the stench. The mint helps, and it is not free.
From the roof the vats are a honeycomb of ochre, blood red and saffron, with pale wells of lime banked between them. The men work waist deep, the dye driven so far into their hands it will never wash out.
Then comes the hard sell on a leather jacket. Leave a small tip for the terrace, take your photographs, and walk out with nothing if you like.
The doors that do open to you are the reward. Step into the Bou Inania or the Al-Attarine medersa, both ticketed and open to visitors, and the noise drops at once. Zellij covers the floor, the cedar overhead has gone soft grey with age, and the plaster is cut so fine it reads as lace.
The great mosque and university of al-Qarawiyyin, founded by tradition in 859, is closed to non-Muslims. From its doorways you can still look down the long aisles of arches to the courtyard and the light in it.
Two nights is enough for the place, if not for the map. On the last afternoon, climb out of the walls to the Merenid tombs on the northern hillside for the long view back.
From up there the medina makes sense at last: a field of courtyards, every flat roof a lid on a room turned away from the street. Stay until the call to prayer rises from all of it at once.
