The North, Tangier & Fez

For the first half of the twentieth century Tangier was one of the most stylish resorts of the Mediterranean, attracting many artists, whether writers such as Joe Orton and Tennessee Williams - who wrote the first draft of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ sitting in The Sun Beach bar - or the painter Matisse. Today, Tangier is primarily a summer resort for Moroccans. Any summer evening the streets between Boulevard Pasteur and Grand Socco are crowded with smartly-dressed families ‘faisant le boulevard’.

Tangier’s interest and attraction lies in the city as a whole - its vibrant café life, its tree-lined boulevards with their mix of art deco and modern architecture, its bustling fishing port overlooked by a dazzling white Kasbah, and the tumbling streets of its Medina - plus a choice of superb beaches on both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts.

The most ancient of the Imperial Capitals, and the most complete medieval city of the Arab world, Fez more than any other city in Morocco seems to exist suspended in time somewhere between the Middle Ages and the modern world. This is Morocco’s cultural and spiritual capital - the Kairaouine Mosque is the oldest centre of learning in the western world, its library containing some 30,000 books - its size and pace in deep contrast to the laid-back ‘village’ which is Marrakech.

As with other Moroccan cities, Fez has a French-built, modern in appearance, Ville Nouvelle but a quarter or so of the city’s 800,000 inhabitants continue to live in the extraordinary Medina-city of Fez el Bali, an incredibly intricate web of lanes, blind alleys and souks. Here silver and copper beaters, leather tanners and carpenters work very much as they did thousands of years ago with the same odours of warm fresh bread and mint tea wafting through the air.