Fez

Fez is the one every returning traveller recommends and every first-time traveller underestimates. The medina is the largest car-free urban area on earth. There are nine thousand alleys. You will get lost. That is the point.

We pair Fez with a local guide for day one — not to show you the monuments, but to teach you how the city reads. By day two you wander alone. By day three you start disliking cities that have cars in them.

The tanneries still work exactly the way they did in the fourteenth century. The ceramic ateliers still fire in wood kilns. This is not a museum pretending to be a city. It is a city that simply never agreed to be modernised.