There are cities you visit, and there are cities that seem to swallow you whole.
Fes is the second kind.
The first time you enter the old medina, you quickly realize that the map has become almost useless. Streets narrow into alleys, alleys turn into passages, and passages suddenly open onto a hidden courtyard, a tiny fountain, a centuries-old mosque, or a market overflowing with colors. There is no straight line. There is barely a sense of direction. You simply walk.
And somehow, that is the point.
Fes does not reveal itself all at once. It makes you earn it.
A city that refuses to be modern
Fes can feel strangely suspended in time.
You hear the clatter of metal being shaped by a craftsman, the calls of merchants, the footsteps of people disappearing around corners. You smell freshly baked bread, spices, leather, mint tea, grilled meat. Donkeys squeeze through streets too narrow for cars. Wooden doors hide riads that have existed for generations.
And then, suddenly, your phone rings.
For a second, the present comes rushing back.
That contrast is what makes Fes so fascinating. It is not a museum. People live here. They argue, work, shop, study, eat, pray, hurry home. The ancient walls are not decorations surrounding a historical attraction; they are part of everyday life.
The past is not preserved behind glass.
It is still being lived.
Getting lost
My favorite thing about Fes might be getting lost in it.
Not the stressful kind of lost, where you are desperately trying to find your way back to your hotel. I mean the other kind—the one where you stop caring where you are going.
You turn left because a doorway catches your attention.
You follow the sound of water.
You smell something delicious and suddenly find yourself standing in front of a tiny bakery.
You climb a staircase and discover a rooftop overlooking a sea of terracotta roofs.
You have absolutely no idea how you got there.
And for once, you don’t really care.
Fes rewards curiosity. The more you wander, the more the city seems to reveal small details that you would never notice if you were simply trying to reach a destination.
A carved wooden door.
A cat sleeping on a doorstep.
A man carrying bread under his arm.
A child running through an alley.
A tiny shop filled with objects whose purpose you cannot even identify.
The beauty of Fes is often found in things that were never designed to be photographed.
A city of hidden worlds
Perhaps what makes Fes so special is how much can exist behind an ordinary door.
From the outside, you might see a modest entrance.
Inside, there can be an enormous riad, decorated with zellige, carved cedarwood and stucco. A completely different world, hidden from the street.
This is something Fes does exceptionally well: hiding things.
You can walk past a wall every day without realizing what lies behind it.
And maybe that is why the city feels like a maze even when you know it well. You can know Fes and still discover something new.
A café you had never noticed.
A quiet street you had never walked through.
A view you had somehow missed.
A building whose history you never knew.
The city keeps some of itself for itself.
The Fes I grew up in
For someone who grew up here, Fes is complicated.
It is easy to stop seeing what is extraordinary when it becomes ordinary.
The alley you walked through a hundred times becomes just an alley. The old buildings become part of the background. The medina becomes somewhere you pass through rather than somewhere you look at.
But distance changes things.
When you leave a city and return to it, you sometimes see it differently.
You notice the things you once ignored.
You realize that the chaos you complained about is also part of its character. The confusing streets, the noise, the smells, the crowds, the imperfections—all of it belongs to the city.
Fes is not polished.
It doesn’t need to be.
Its beauty comes from the fact that it feels alive.
And perhaps that is why I like calling it a maze in the past.
Because Fes is a place where you can lose your way and, for a moment, lose your sense of time too.
You walk through one doorway, turn into another alley, and suddenly you are standing somewhere that feels hundreds of years old.
Then a motorcycle passes beside you.
Someone calls your name.
A shopkeeper offers you tea.
And you remember:
You are not in the past.
You are in Fes.