Fez: Morocco's oldest medina

The day begins in the heart of the medina, where in 859 Fatima al-Fihri founded what UNESCO recognizes today as the oldest university institution in the world still in operation: the University of al-Qarawiyyin, whose library remains only partially visitable by non-Muslims.

Just a few alleys away, saffron and indigo still color the water of open-air stone basins at the Chouara Tannery, active since the eleventh century and observable from the terraces of the surrounding shops.

Continuing through the alleys, carved stuccos, zellige mosaics and a ceiling in carved cedar make the Bou Inania Madrasa, a fourteenth-century Quranic school, one of the best-preserved examples of Marinid architecture in all of Morocco.

The route closes at Bab Boujloud, the monumental gate covered with blue ceramics on one side and green on the other, which introduces the spice, carpet and hand-beaten brass souks of the medina.

The leather that comes out of the Chouara Tannery today is worked much as it was a thousand years ago, when al-Qarawiyyin University was already training scholars while Europe was in the depths of its own Middle Ages.

In many alleyways of the medina, some less than two meters wide, the donkey remains today the only means capable of carrying goods into the innermost quarters, where no motorized vehicle can enter.