5 Best Sights in Fez and the Middle Atlas, Morocco

The city's famous medieval tanneries are at once beautiful, for their ancient dyeing vats of reds, yellows, and blues, and unforgettable, for the malodorous smell of the sheep, goat, cow, and camel skins. The terrace overlooking the dyeing vats is high enough to escape the place's full fetid power and get a spectacular view over the multicolor vats. Absorb both the process and the finished product on Rue Chouara, just past Rue Mechatine (named for the combs made from animals' horns): numerous stores are filled with loads of leather goods, including coats, bags, and babouches (traditional slippers). One of the shopkeepers will hand you a few sprigs of fresh mint to smother the smell, before explaining what's going on in the tanneries below—how the skins are placed successively in saline solution, quicklime, pigeon droppings, and then any of several natural dyes: poppies for red, turmeric for yellow, saffron for orange, indigo for blue, and mint for green. Barefoot workers in shorts pick up skins from the bottoms of the dyeing vats with their feet, then work them manually. Though this may look like an undesirable job, the work is relatively well paid and still in demand for a strong export market.

Graceful proportions, elegant, geometric carved-cedar ornamentation, and its excellent state of preservation make this 14th-century building one of the best representations of Moorish architecture in Fez. Named for local spice merchants, the former Koranic school was founded by Merenid sultan Abou Saïd Othman as a students' dormitory attached to the Kairaouine Mosque next door. 

Arguably just as beautiful and more well-preserved than its better-known Fassi namesake, the Meknès version is a showcase for Merenid design; this Islamic educational institution, now a historic site, was finished in 1358. From the cupola to the enormous bronze doors on the street, virtually every inch of this building is covered with decorative carving or calligraphy. The central fountain was for ablutions before prayer. Head upstairs to visit the small rooms that overlook the courtyard. These housed the 60 communal tolba, or student reciters.  The rooftop terrace has one of best panoramic views of Meknès's medina.

Closed at the time of writing, the green-tiled pavilion of Koubbat as-Sufara is where Moulay Ismail received ambassadors from abroad; the stairs to the right of the entrance lead down to the Habs Qara, immense subterranean slave quarters, built by an imprisoned Portuguese architect to earn his freedom. Here up to 60,000 enslaved people (of whom 40,000 were reportedly Christian prisoners of war) were shackled to the wall and forced to labor on the sultan's building projects.

An outstanding historic site from the Merenids, the Moulay Idriss Medersa was built in the 14th century by sultan Abou el Hassan. The medersa, hidden in the town's steep and twisting streets, has a striking cylindrical minaret constructed in 1939 that is the only one of its kind in Morocco, standing as testimony to Turkish and Arab influences. Originally built with materials from Volubilis, the minaret is decorated with green ceramic tiles bearing inscriptions of the 114 suras (chapters) of the Koran. Only Muslims can enter the medersa.