Marrakech

Marrakech sits at the edge of the Sahara and the foot of the Atlas like a city that refused to choose a landscape. The medina is walled, earth-red, and older than most countries. Within ten minutes of arriving you will have smelled orange blossom, diesel, saffron, and wet mint — usually in that order.

We send travellers here when they want to feel like they have actually left. It is not a city you get in a day. Give it four. Take a riad inside the medina, not a hotel outside it. Eat where the taxi drivers eat. Ask our concierges for the rooftop nobody tags.

Most visitors spend one afternoon at Jemaa el-Fna and call it done. The travellers who come back are the ones who walk the tannery at dawn, who drive up to Ourika for the morning, who take the train to Essaouira on Friday and sleep by the Atlantic on Saturday.