Travelling in Morocco: the royal capitals people still live in

Why Morocco's itinerary runs through four old capitals

Wikipedia's article on tourism in Morocco puts one category at the head of its list of attractions, the imperial cities, which it defines as the four historical capitals. Each held a dynasty's court, and each is a separate World Heritage property.

In 789 Idris I founded a settlement south-east of Volubilis called Medinat Fas, and the Idrisid dynasty he had established the year before made it the capital. The Marinids built a second walled town beside it in 1276, Fes Jdid, which is why Fez has two old medina quarters; the larger, Fes el Bali, is a car-free pedestrian zone. In Turkish, Morocco is still called Fas, after the city.

Marrakesh was founded by the Almoravid leader Abu Bakr ibn Umar. The historical sources give dates from 1062 to 1078, and modern historians most often use 1070. It was the capital of the Almoravids, the Almohads and the Saadians, who seized it in 1524, and it gave the country its Spanish name, Marruecos, from which the English Morocco comes.

Meknes had its turn under Ismail Ibn Sharif, sultan from 1672 to 1727, who moved the capital there from Fez and built the Kasbah of Moulay Ismail, a fortified palace-city whose construction went on for the whole of his reign.

Rabat's walls are older than its role. The Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min built most of the present Kasbah of the Udayas in 1150 and 1151, and a later Almohad capital beside it, Ribat al-Fath, was never finished but left the outer walls of the historic centre. During the protectorate the French moved the sultan's court from Fez to Rabat, and Rabat has been the capital since; Wikipedia's tourism article gives 1925 as the year Fez stopped being the capital. UNESCO's inscription of 2012 names both halves of the city's history: Rabat, Modern Capital and Historic City.

Even the one archaeological site on the list was a capital. Volubilis, inscribed in 1997, was founded in the third century BCE as a Mauritanian capital, became an outpost of the Roman Empire, and was briefly the capital of Idris I, who is buried at nearby Moulay Idris.

Which of Morocco's heritage sites are lived in

Morocco ratified the World Heritage Convention on 28 October 1975 and had nine properties inscribed by 2026, every one of them cultural. Seven are towns or the old cores of towns: the medinas of Fez in 1981, Marrakesh in 1985, Tétouan in 1997 and Essaouira, formerly Mogador, in 2001; the historic city of Meknes in 1996; the Portuguese city of Mazagan, now El Jadida, in 2004; and Rabat in 2012. The other two are Volubilis and the Ksar of Ait-Ben-Haddou, a fortified village west of Ouarzazate inscribed in 1987. Fourteen more wait on the tentative list.

A medina, in the definition used by Wikipedia's article on Moroccan culture, is the walled urban area of a city, and its ordinary house is the dar. From the street a dar shows thick, high walls with no ornament and almost no windows. A guest comes in through a zigzagging passage that hides the central courtyard, and the rooms around it are long and narrow because the joists that span them are usually shorter than thirteen feet, about four metres. The upstairs reception room, the dormiria, is often the most lavish in the house, with tilework, painted furniture and embroidered cushions.

A riad garden is an interior garden divided symmetrically into four parts. The earliest one known in Morocco came to light in the excavated remains of the Almoravid palace in Marrakesh. Its fountain cools the house, as water evaporating from the basin draws heat out of the rooms around it.

These are the houses that riad tourism is named for. In Fez many non-Moroccans have restored riads and dars in the medina as second homes. In Marrakesh riad tourism has shaped the urban fabric of the city, and the researchers cited in Wikipedia's tourism article read the result critically. Mauro Spotorno wrote in 2018 that the medina had been cultivated since the protectorate as a setting for Westerners that matched Orientalist stereotypes of the Muslim world, and that "more and more frequently traditional houses of the historical centre have been restored and renovated into hotel facilities". Nancy Nabeel Aly Demerdash concludes that "Marrakesh has become more of a product than place".

The Bertelsmann Transformation Index's 2026 report on Morocco says the Vision 2030 tourism initiative has strained natural resources and led to displacement and gentrification in popular areas, and it records accusations of illegal demolitions and forced evictions in the L'Océan district of Rabat, allegedly to clear ground for a golf course. The tourism ministry credits the same growth with driving investment, supporting jobs and spreading economic development across the regions.

What Fez and Marrakesh keep inside their walls

Fez and Marrakesh had their medinas inscribed in 1981 and 1985, the first two Moroccan properties on the list.

What stands inside the Fez medina

The monuments Wikipedia's tourism article names in Fez are the Bou Inania and al-Attarine madrasas, the zawiya of Moulay Idriss II, Dar al-Magana, the Ibn Danan Synagogue and the University of al-Quaraouiyine, founded in 859. The city has been called the "Mecca of the West" and the "Athens of Africa", the second a nickname it shares with Cyrene in Libya.

Marrakesh led the market in the mid-2000s, and Fez recorded a 20% rise in visitors in 2004. Its plan involved a substantial restructuring of the old city and more hotel capacity, and direct flights from France replaced the change of planes in Casablanca that visitors had needed before.

The tarboush, the red cap that Wikipedia's culture article calls the traditional hat from Fez, is known in English as a fez, and Moroccan cooking takes its oranges and lemons from the city.

How Jemaa el-Fna came onto a UNESCO list

Marrakesh's central square sits on a second UNESCO register. In 2008 the cultural space of Jemaa el-Fna Square was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, in the same year as the Moussem of Tan-Tan, and that listing stands beside the medina's World Heritage inscription of 1985. Wikipedia's culture article traces Morocco's modern art movement to a ten-day exhibition that a group of abstract artists held in the square more than fifty years ago; one of them, Farid Belkahia, who died in 2014, has a museum in the city.

Other draws are more recent. Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé bought the Majorelle botanical garden in 1980, and Wikipedia's tourism article credits their presence with raising the city's profile; the Yves Saint Laurent Museum is in Marrakesh, and the Marrakech International Film Festival has been held there since 2001. Marrakesh had more than 2 million visitors in 2017.

The earthquake of 8 September 2023, centred 73.4 km south-west of the city near Ighil and the Oukaïmeden ski resort, reached into the medina. Homes in the older districts and parts of the walls collapsed, a minaret of the Kharboush Mosque on Jemaa el-Fna fell onto vehicles, and the Kutubiyya Mosque was damaged. Eighteen people died in Marrakesh, out of at least 2,960 nationally, and UNESCO experts were in the medina on 9 September 2023, the next day. The World Heritage Centre's file on the medina carries state of conservation reports dated 2024 and 2026.

Who Morocco's visitors are and how they are counted

Morocco created a Ministry of Tourism in 1985, and the ministry publishes the count. It recorded 19.8 million arrivals in 2025, 14% more than in 2024 and 53% more than in 2019. Receipts in foreign currency reached 138 billion dirhams in 2025, 21% above 2024, and classified tourist accommodation recorded 43.4 million nights, up 9%. Agence Ecofin noted that the target for 2025 in the documents accompanying the 2026 finance bill had been 18 million.

Who is counted matters. In 2017, when arrivals stood at 10.3 million, 30% of the people counted as tourists were Moroccans living abroad, from a diaspora then put at 3.8 million. The sources also differ at the margins: Wikipedia's tourism article gives 13.2 million arrivals for 2023 and Agence Ecofin 14.5 million, and for 2024 UN Tourism gives 17.4 million while Ecofin gives 17.5 million. Tourism's weight in the economy depends on the measure as well. UN Tourism put its contribution at 7.3% of GDP by 2023, and a World Travel and Tourism Council study cited by Ecofin put it at 12.3% in 2024.

The market was narrower a generation earlier. In the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s between 1 and 1.5 million Europeans visited, most of them French or Spanish, with about 100,000 each from Britain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, and most went to the Atlantic beach resorts, Agadir in particular. Receipts fell 16.5% in 1990, the year the Gulf War began.

Visitors from Algeria numbered 1.66 million in 1992 and 1.28 million in 1993; after the Marrakesh attack of 1994 Algeria closed its border, and the count fell to 70,000 that year and 13,000 in 1995. In 2020 the pandemic cut total arrivals to no more than 4 million.

The next target is set by football. Morocco co-hosts the 2030 World Cup with Spain and Portugal, and the government's tourism roadmap aims at 26 million tourists that year by Ecofin's account, while Wikipedia gives a goal of 35 million a year by 2030, a total expected to include 1.2 million fans attending matches. In March 2026 the national tourism development agency, SMIT, announced plans to add 25,000 hotel rooms over four years, a fifth more capacity. Bank Al-Maghrib's board, meeting on 22 September 2026, projected travel receipts of 160 billion dirhams in 2027.

Where Morocco built its beach resorts

Under the protectorate, from 1912 to 1956, tourism was a matter of cities, Tangier and Casablanca among them. Tangier, an International Zone from 1923 to 1956, drew writers including Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs, and its sites for visitors include the Tangier American Legation, the Grand Socco and Hercules Cave outside the city.

The beach resorts came later. Agadir on the Atlantic was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and Wikipedia's tourism article puts a third of all Moroccan bed nights there and describes it as a base for tours into the Atlas. The Plan Azur, a royal initiative, set out six coastal resorts for holiday-home owners and tourists, five on the Atlantic and one on the Mediterranean, together with upgraded regional airports for budget airlines and new rail and road links. Arrivals rose 11% in the first five months of 2008 on the same months of 2007, with 927,000 French visitors, 587,000 Spanish and 141,000 British.

Essaouira, the former Mogador, has had its medina on the World Heritage List since 2001, and its summers are set by the ocean, with highs almost always around 21 °C. Orson Welles filmed scenes of his Othello there in 1952. Further north, El Jadida was the Portuguese town of Mazagan, which Morocco took from Portugal in 1729. UNESCO inscribed it in 2004 as an "outstanding example of the interchange of influences between European and Moroccan cultures", and picks out the cistern and the Manueline Church of the Assumption among the buildings of the Portuguese period.

Casablanca is the main cruise port, and cruise ships call at Tangier as well. The Hassan II Mosque there has a minaret 656 feet high, about 200 metres. The twentieth-century city, built in part by modernist and brutalist architects such as Elie Azagury and Jean-François Zevaco, has been on Morocco's tentative list since 2013.

Where the Atlas and the desert begin for visitors

Ouarzazate is a noted film-making location. Cinema in Morocco goes back to 1897, when Louis Lumière filmed Le chevrier Marocain, and between then and 1944 many foreign films were shot in the country, especially around Ouarzazate. David Lean shot a scene of Lawrence of Arabia there in 1962, and the Ksar of Ait-Ben-Haddou to its west has been the setting of many films.

The Atlas and the Rif are walking country from late March to mid-November, and Wikipedia's tourism article recorded in 2006 that the government was investing in trekking circuits and developing desert tourism in competition with Tunisia. Britannica gives the High Atlas a length of 740 km, rising from small hills at the Atlantic edge to Jbel Toubkal. In the alpine zone of the Middle Atlas and the eastern High Atlas, around Ifrane and Azrou, winters are long, cold and snowy, and there are ski resorts at Oukaimeden and Mischliefen.

The villages below Toubkal were hit hard in 2023. The earthquake destroyed or severely damaged Imlil, Tafeghaghte and Adassil, and in Tafeghaghte, a village of 200 residents, 90 people died. At Tinmel, the High Atlas village where the Almohad movement had its base in the twelfth century, a tower of the mosque partly collapsed and the walls around it fell. On 20 September 2023 a five-year rehousing plan of US$11.7 billion was announced for six provinces.

Two deserts are within reach. The Agafay desert, about thirty kilometres from Marrakesh on the first heights of the High Atlas, is a stony reg of several hundred hectares among hills and dunes of white and ochre. Merzouga, a small village in the south-east, sits by the Erg Chebbi dunes, where luxury desert camps have grown up in numbers.

When the weather and the calendar suit a visit

Most of Morocco falls into two climate types, hot-summer Mediterranean and hot desert, and the World Bank's climate portal puts the national annual mean at 18.53 °C and annual rainfall at 296.29 mm over 1995 to 2014.

The Mediterranean shore around Tangier and Tétouan has dry summers with highs of 29 to 32 °C and mild, wet winters averaging 9 to 11 °C a day. The Atlantic cities of Rabat, Salé, Kénitra and Casablanca have cooler summers, with highs around 27 °C. Inland, Fez and Meknes have a continental pattern: summer highs usually of 32 to 36 °C, up to 40 °C in a heatwave, nights that cool to below 20 °C, and winters that drop below freezing several times between December and February. Fez recorded minus 8 °C in the winter of 2005. Marrakesh, Agadir and Oujda are semi-arid, with 200 to 350 mm of rain a year.

The religious calendar sets its own terms. During Ramadan, which next begins in February 2027 by the British government's reckoning, eating, drinking or smoking in public in the daytime may cause offence, and hotels and restaurants serving food in fasting hours may separate their other customers from Muslim guests with screens. The clocks no longer move for it. Morocco has kept Greenwich Mean Time all year since 20 September 2026, which ended the hour's change that had come with every Ramadan since 2018.

Several dates are inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage. The Moussem of Tan-Tan has been on the list since 2008, the Cherry Festival in Sefrou since 2012, Tbourida since 2021 and the engraving of gold, silver and copper since 2023, and Taskiwin, a martial dance of the western High Atlas, went onto the list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2017. Gnawa, the music of a Sufi brotherhood, was inscribed in 2019, and the culture article covers it with the rest of the list. Film has its own fixtures: the Mediterranean Film Festival, first held in Tangier in 1968, now meets in Tétouan.

How a visitor gets into Morocco and moves around

Morocco's land frontiers are few, and one of them is shut.

Which borders a traveller can cross

The border with Algeria has been closed since 1994. To the north, Spain holds Ceuta, Melilla and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera on the African shore, which Morocco claims, and those exclaves give Morocco land borders with Spain on its own side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Holidaymakers on Spain's southern coast cross for trips of one to three days.

To the south, Wikipedia's geography article runs Morocco's border with Western Sahara along latitude 27°40′ north. The status of Western Sahara is disputed, and this catalogue records the dispute and takes no position on it.

How the trains and roads connect the cities

The high-speed line between Tangier and Casablanca was built from 2014 by the national railway company, ONCF, and inaugurated in 2018. It is the first phase of a planned network of 1,500 km, and an extension to Marrakesh is planned. The older standard-gauge lines go back to the protectorate, which built the line from Tangier to Fez and the lines from Casablanca to Kenitra and Sidi Kacem and to Marrakech, the last completed in 1928.

Traffic drives on the right. The authorities record a car's registration at the border on the way in, and a driver who tries to leave in a different vehicle is detained.

What a visitor should know about money and guides

The Moroccan dirham is a closed currency, which cannot easily be exchanged outside the country, and foreign currency worth 100,000 dirhams or more has to be declared on entry or exit, under the British government's guidance of 2026. Inside the medinas, a guide must carry an official badge and the local authority's permission. Arabic and Standard Moroccan Tamazight are the official languages, and sockets take the Europlug and the Type E plug at 220 volts.