Fes is Morocco's cultural capital and usually the second city on a Latin American itinerary. For anyone with an interest in the Iberian world it is also the most resonant: the Andalusian quarter was settled by Muslim and Jewish families expelled from Cordoba and Granada, and the architecture, the music and the cooking still carry that inheritance directly.
It is also where the gap between a driver and a hire car opens widest. Fes el Bali is a walled medieval quarter of roughly nine thousand lanes, and not one admits a vehicle - goods still move through it on donkeys. You never drive to your riad in Fes; you drive to a gate and walk.
Worth settling before you arrive: your driver cannot legally guide you inside the medina. Moroccan law licenses tour guides separately and enforces it. In Fes that matters more than anywhere else, because without a guide most visitors see the tanneries, one medersa and the inside of several shops.
Why hire a driver here
- Around 9,000 lanes make up Fes el Bali, and no vehicle enters any of them
- The Andalusian quarter is the direct inheritance of Cordoba and Granada
- Getting the gate right saves a fifteen-minute walk carrying luggage
- With a car Volubilis, Meknes and Moulay Idriss are straightforward; otherwise they are not
- Going south the route crosses the Middle Atlas and descends the Ziz Gorge
Included in every booking
- Fuel, tolls and the driver's fee for the agreed route
- Airport, riad gate, hotel or railway station pickup
- Spanish, Portuguese and English-speaking drivers available
- Help with luggage as far as the entrance of the derb
- Bottled water and phone charging in the vehicle
