Discover Morocco

Morocco holds four imperial cities — Fez, Marrakesh, Meknes and Rabat — and each was a capital in its turn. Fez el-Bali, founded in the ninth century, is among the largest car-free urban areas in the world, a labyrinth of some nine thousand lanes around the Qarawiyyin, which UNESCO recognises as the oldest continuously operating degree-granting university anywhere.

The country's culture is a genuine confluence. Amazigh communities have held the mountains and the pre-Saharan valleys for millennia; Arab dynasties brought Islam and the classical sciences; refugees from Al-Andalus carried Andalusian architecture, music and craft across the strait; and the caravan routes tied the whole of it to West Africa.

The landscape changes as sharply as the history. The Atlas ranges rise above four thousand metres and hold snow into late spring, the Draa and Ziz valleys run in green lines of date palm through bare rock, and the dunes of Erg Chebbi and Erg Chigaga mark the beginning of the Sahara.

Craft remains a working economy rather than a museum piece: tanneries, zellij tilework, cedar carving, carpet weaving and metalwork are still practised in the same quarters of the same cities where they were organised into guilds centuries ago.