Fez Is a Hill, and Your Suitcase Will Find Out

Almost every riad in Fez photographs the same way: four storeys of zellij around a courtyard, a fountain, a lemon tree in a pot, a roof terrace laid for breakfast with the medina going blue behind it. The pictures are true. They are also close to interchangeable, and they leave out the part of the stay people actually complain about afterwards, which is the ten or twenty minutes between the point where the car stops and the door where somebody finally takes the bag off you.

Fes el-Bali, the walled old city that UNESCO inscribed in 1981, is routinely described as one of the largest car-free urban areas in the world. Its main artery is called Tala'a Kebira, which translates roughly as the great climb, and the name is not decorative. The medina is built across the sides of a river valley and it drains downhill from the western gates towards the Qarawiyyin mosque and the river beyond. Every bed in the old city sits somewhere on that gradient, at the end of a lane no taxi can enter. So the first decision is not how much to spend. It is which gate you want to arrive at, and how far above or below it you are prepared to sleep.

The Gate Is the Real Booking

Vehicles stop at the perimeter. In practice that means a short list of points: Bab Boujloud, the blue-tiled gate at the top of the medina; Batha, the square beside the Dar Batha museum, which has its own taxi rank; Ain Azliten on the northern rim; the Oued Zhoune parking, also north; Bab Guissa above it; Place R'cif down at the bottom by the river; and Bab Ftouh on the southeastern edge. From whichever one your driver picks, you walk.

How far you walk is the single most useful number a property can give you, and the good ones volunteer it. Riad Laaroussa states plainly that it is a five-minute walk from the Batha and Ain Azliten gates and that a porter will meet you there and lead you in. Palais Amani, in the Blida quarter, puts its own figure at about three minutes from the Oued Zhoune parking. Places deep in the Qarawiyyin quarter tend to be quieter on the subject, for reasons that become obvious on arrival.

Two habits make the difference. Send your arrival time by WhatsApp the day before and ask which gate to be dropped at; riads here are entirely used to the question, and many will post someone to stand at it. And if a listing will not name a gate or a walking time, treat the silence as information.

Porters with handcarts work the main gates and will take luggage in for a modest negotiated sum. Agree the figure before the bags go on the cart. In spring and autumn, which are the seasons most visitors should be aiming for in Fez, that walk is a pleasure. In high summer it is a different proposition.

Budget: Sleep Beside a Gate, Not Behind Six Turns

At the bottom of the market the medina's geometry stops being atmospheric and becomes the whole problem. A dormitory bed in Fez typically costs somewhere around the equivalent of fifteen to twenty-five US dollars at the time of writing, and at that price nobody is sending a porter to find you. What you want is a bed you can practically see the gate from.

Two places do this well. Hostel Medina Social Club sits just inside Bab R'cif, the flattest and most vehicle-accessible entrance to the old city; it runs an eight-bed mixed dormitory and a four-bed women's dormitory alongside private rooms, and includes a Moroccan breakfast. Funky Fes is also a couple of minutes from Place R'cif, close to the Bab Jdid gate, with private rooms, a patio and three terraces.

R'cif is the right budget base for a structural reason rather than a romantic one. It is the lowest point of the medina, it has a large open square with a taxi rank, and buses and cars reach it. If you are arriving after dark, leaving before dawn for a train, or carrying more than you should be, this is where the friction is lowest and the money saved is not immediately spent again on stress.

The cost is the return leg. Everything celebrated in the upper medina, from the Bou Inania madrasa and the Dar al-Magana water clock to the Chrabliyine mosque and the grilled-meat stalls inside Bab Boujloud, is above you. Your day therefore ends with a climb. Anyone with good knees can call that free exercise. Everyone else should note that a petit taxi around the outside of the walls between Batha and R'cif takes only a few minutes and costs very little, and that taking one is not an admission of defeat.

Mid-Range: The Batha Slope, Where the Riads Cluster

The middle of the market in Fez is unusually strong, and it concentrates on the upper western slope, in the wedge between Bab Boujloud, Batha and Ain Azliten and spilling eastwards along Tala'a Kebira and its quieter parallel, Tala'a Seghira. Expect to pay somewhere in the region of 1,000 to 1,500 dirhams a night for a double in a restored house at this level, breakfast usually included.

Riad Laaroussa occupies a seventeenth-century palace a few minutes above Batha, with a garden courtyard, a hammam and a spa. Dar Bensouda, roughly a quarter of an hour further in from Batha square, was assembled from a former madrasa and the buildings around it and has a pool in its courtyard, which is rare at this price inside the walls. Riad Idrissy, a restored house some four centuries old with five suites, is worth knowing about even if you sleep elsewhere: its Ruined Garden restaurant, set in an excavated ruin beside the riad, typically opens to the public in the early afternoon and serves into the evening, and is one of very few places in the medina where you eat outdoors under trees.

Why this particular band? Because it puts the walking on your side. From Batha and Boujloud the ground falls away to the east, so the natural shape of a Fez day, out in the morning and down Tala'a Kebira past the shoemakers and the spice souk to the Attarine madrasa and the Qarawiyyin, and then on towards the tanneries, is a descent. You come back by taxi around the walls, or you climb in the cool of the evening. Sleep in the deep medina and that shape inverts: every morning begins uphill, before coffee.

It also leaves you five minutes from a taxi rank. For anyone in Fez for two or three nights, which is the right length for a first visit, the Batha slope is the least complicated answer at this budget.

The Top of the Market: the Palace, or the View

Above roughly 2,000 dirhams a night the choice splits cleanly, and the split is once again about the hill.

The first option is to buy a great house inside the medina and accept the walk. Riad Fes, a Relais and Chateaux member in the Ziat quarter near Batha, is the most formal of them, with four patios, Hispano-Moorish plasterwork, a terrace over the whole bowl of the old city and its Moroccan restaurant, L'Ambre. Palais Amani, north of the Qarawiyyin in the Blida quarter, is a former family palace with an art deco inflection, a walled garden courtyard, a hammam, cookery classes and its Eden restaurant. Karawan Riad is the small and quiet one, a handful of rooms and suites in a house dating to the 1600s, with a courtyard, a terrace and a hammam of its own.

The second option is to sleep above the medina and look down at it. Palais Faraj, which the Michelin Guide lists among its recommended hotels, stands on the hillside over the old city in a nineteenth-century palace that belonged to the Bensouda family; it has around twenty-five rooms and suites and a terrace with an uninterrupted view across the rooftops. Hotel Sahrai, on the hill between the medina and the modern city, is the contemporary alternative, a design hotel with a pool and a spa and the same panorama from a slightly different angle.

The trade is legible enough to decide on. Inside the walls you wake up in the thing you came for and you walk everywhere, with the dawn call to prayer going off more or less overhead. Above the walls you get a car to the door, a lift, a pool and a view of the medina rather than a position within it. Neither is the wrong answer; they answer different questions, and it is worth knowing which one you are asking before you pay.

If You Would Rather Not Walk At All

Fez has two districts off the hill, and both are legitimate for the right traveller.

Fes el-Jdid, the thirteenth-century "new" quarter, holds the royal palace gates and the Mellah, the Jewish quarter established in 1438. It sits between the old medina and the modern city, is markedly calmer than Fes el-Bali, and has very few places to stay, which means booking well ahead if you want one.

The Ville Nouvelle is the French-built grid, and it is where the wheels are. The railway station stands at its northern end, roughly three and a half kilometres from the medina; a petit taxi between the station and Bab Boujloud comes to about twenty dirhams on the meter. Hotels here have car parks, lifts, pools and rooms you reach without a porter. Barcelo Fes Medina is the dependable four-star example, a few minutes from the station with an outdoor pool. Note the name carefully, because the hotel is in the new city and not in the medina at all, a confusion that catches people out every year.

Arriving from Fes-Saiss airport is straightforward to either. The airport is around fifteen to seventeen kilometres out, a drive of roughly twenty to forty minutes depending on traffic. Taxis work to a published fixed fare that has recently been in the region of 120 dirhams into town, and the airport bus runs to the railway station for a few dirhams and takes about forty minutes.

Booking It

The short version, by kind of trip.

Two or three nights on a first visit: take the upper medina between Batha and Bab Boujloud. It is the best-supplied part of the market at every price, it faces the right way down the hill, and it is minutes from a taxi rank on the evening you have had enough of lanes.

Four nights or more, or a second visit: go deeper, into the Qarawiyyin quarter, around Seffarine, or across the river into the Andalusian quarter, which is quieter and more residential. Dar Seffarine, beside the coppersmiths' square behind a door with nothing written on it, is the emblem of that choice. You will get lost more often, and you will also hear the medina start work at six in the morning. Accept the climb as the price.

On a tight budget: R'cif, at the bottom, where the transport reaches.

With mobility limits, a very early train, small children or one suitcase too many: the Ville Nouvelle, or one of the hillside hotels above the walls, and a taxi in each morning.

Whatever you book, do three things. Send your arrival time and ask which gate. Get a WhatsApp number before you fly. And pin the gate rather than the riad in your offline map, because satellite positioning drifts badly between nine thousand-odd lanes walled three storeys high, and the gate is the one point it will always find.