01 April 08

Features

lost in fez

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It may be getting a bit of a clean up, but Fez is still a vibrant and historic city, where the sights (and smells) will blow you away. Simon Busch pays a visit. Photography by Lin Fou

It’s a city of powerful smells – from leather to mint to mule pee – and magical and mystical enough to satisfy the most well-travelled romantic’s dreams. And, although something has changed about Fez since I was last here, three years ago, it’s not the city’s aroma.

There is something big at work here – the thick, looming city walls, 1,000 years old in parts, are being rendered disconcertingly clean. Meanwhile, hordes of Europeans are buying up riads – the classic Moroccan urban dwelling, with cool, planted inner courtyards open to the sky – and restoring them as winter-sun getaways. Perhaps that’s it, a boom in property investment and tourism causing what suggests, at least on the surface, an urban deep clean.

A battered old riad costs at least €100,000 now – twice the price of five years ago, according to a Fassi man outside our hotel, itself a converted riad. So, feeling the urge, my photographer, our guide and I went to investigate one such battered old house nominally for sale at the end of a typically claustrophobic Fez alley. But the skinny grandfather with the Father Christmas beard who opened the door refused us entry, saying he was sick of all these foreigners marching through and gawping, talking prices but never settling on one. This wasn’t how Moroccans – barterers extraordinaires – were used to doing business.

Still, if he did ever sell, he could build a house or three in the countryside from bricks of dirhams, and I half expected to see the Moroccan equivalent of a London estate agent, equally success-plumped, slick of hair and locatable by his aftershave – or perhaps actual London estate agents, escaping prerecessionary Britain. But there are no gleaming glass frontages in Fez – property wares laid out like cakes behind – the estate agency remains in its primordial state here, a spartan cupboard off the street, eventually identifiable by a faded door key sprayed onto a plank.

The shabby agencies, and the smells, are a sign of something wider, because, despite its superficial air of improvement, Fez has in many ways remained unchanged for centuries. And it is in exploring its medieval ambience that the real pleasure of the city lies.

There are two parts to Fez, the 9th-century Fes el-Bali, or “Fes the Old”, and 13th-century Fes el-Djedid, or “New Fes”, and you should get lost in both. I say should, not in the sense of some spirit of hippy mysticism, nor because getting lost is “all part of the fun”, but because it’s impossible not to, so you may as well resign yourself to it from the start. There’s no point fighting it, especially in Fes el-Bali, with its red clay walls, tiny alleyways and white-grey buildings with no view outside the immediate streets in front of you. And don’t worry about a guide unless you really want to – Fes el-Bali is small enough that you will find your way out eventually, regardless of whatever the pushy guides seeking employ tell you.