Sensory overload

Morocco is the brash colours of spices, the flutter of pigeons’ wings against minarets, the scent of mint tea and bazaars hung with carpets and lamps. It has a rich and satisfying cuisine and a millennia-old history of conquerors, nomads and traders that blends Islamic, European and North African influences. In the last decade, Morocco has also realigned itself as a contemporary, tolerant society in which old and new collide.

Rabat is a good place to slide cautiously into Morocco. The capital is its most ordered city, cosmopolitan and glamorous in an old-fashioned way and emerging as a cultural centre, with good museums and a redeveloped riverfront graced with a Zaha Hadid-designed opera house.

You can visit royal tombs and mosques and tuck into fine French cuisine under the shade of plane trees. Layers of history include Roman and medieval ruins where storks nest, and a kasbah (citadel) of blue-and-white alleyways and teahouses overlooking the ocean.

From Rabat it’s a two-hour drive inland to Meknes, whose fortifications are draped over successive hillsides in concentric rings. The old imperial capital has subsided into provincial obscurity and is a centre for traditional crafts. Tailors tap in tiny shops and cobblers make red leather slippers fit for a vizier. The main market glistens with pyramids of olives and bags of nougat tied with yellow ribbon. 

It’s an hour east to Fes, capital of Morocco until 1925. The world’s largest intact medieval city sprawls splendidly over several hills and is crammed with World Heritage mosques and courtyard houses gorgeous in stucco and stained glass. The ancient trading city’s medina (old town), with its claustrophobic but wonderful alleyways, seems scarcely to have changed in centuries. Prepare for butchers selling flyblown camel meat, tailors sewing striped djellabas and craftsmen tapping at copper pots and dyeing leather. Ever-narrowing alleys throw up constant charms –  medieval archways, tottering buildings, tiled fountains.

A big surprise of Morocco is the beauty of its landscapes, which vary from high mountains to wave-pounded coastlines, lush green northern farmland to scalloped southern sand dunes. The road beyond Fes brings you over undulating hills bursting with springtime wildflowers to Volubilis, a ruined second-century Roman town notable for gorgeous mosaic floors. Down the road is Moulay Idriss, a town of cubist houses wedged into a steep mountain gap. Moroccans make pilgrimages here to visit the shrine of the country’s great seventeenth-century sultan, Moulay Ismail.

Back on the coast, there isn’t much to bring tourists to Casablanca, yet the city is economically Morocco’s most important and has an exhilarating buzz. 

Nightclubs and seafood restaurants line the waterfront and grand Art Deco-era squares contrast with older, Andalusian-style alleys. Hassan II Mosque, one of the world’s largest mosques, is an eruption of marble topped by a whopping 210-metre minaret on the seafront. In the evening, it resembles an illuminated space rocket.

Morocco has a good motorway network and efficient roads and beyond clogged city centres driving is easy. You could speed direct from Casablanca to Marrakesh in under three hours, but stick to the coast instead and enjoy Oualidia, a kickback fishing village turned tranquil seaside getaway for wealthy Moroccans, flanked by a gorgeous caramel-coloured beach and wrapped around a flamingo-haunted lagoon. 

Oualidia is all about lowkey pleasures – devouring oysters, taking boat excursions and enjoying sumptuous sunsets.

As you head south and inland, the landscape becomes a reddish, treeless plain ringed by purple hills. Then Marrakesh appears, a pink city of medieval ramparts against the snowy barrier of Atlas Mountains. Behind its walls is a fabulous medina in whose winding, high-walled alleys you’ll easily get lost. Never mind, because you might come across a crumbling palace, magnificent mosques or stucco-work tombs with gold ceilings.

Craftsmen work cedar wood, bakers flip enormous rounds of flat bread and café owners serve mint tea to locals smoking hubble-bubbles. As the sun sets, move out of the tangle of alleys into legendary Jamaa el-Fna Square, where monkeys juggle, fortune-tellers mutter and street performers drum. Locals flock here in the evening to munch on snails, slow-roasted lamb or bags of dried nuts. The square has no notable buildings – humanity provides the spectacle – although eleventh-century Koutoubia Mosque with its 70-metre minaret is just down the road.

Beyond the medina lies another Marrakesh of wellness retreats, luxe courtyard hotels, chic nightclubs and innovative restaurants. You’ll also find Jardin Majorelle, created by Yves St Laurent, who holidayed in a blue villa surrounded by cactus and extravagant bougainvillea now open to visitors.

If you’re keen on shopping that goes beyond the camel bags and wood carvings of the bazaar, head to Sidi Ghanem, a suburban light-industrial zone that is slowly being taken over by the studios and workshops of forward-looking Moroccan and expat French designers. You’ll find local textiles, retro European fashions and batik-like cloth from neighbouring Mauretania, alongside upmarket homewares that make for sophisticated souvenirs.

An hour’s drive out of Marrakesh brings you to the dunes around La Pause, where you can enjoy camel rides as well as a lamp-lit dinner in a carpet-scattered tent. If you have the time, though, get out to the spectacular Egu Chebbi dunes that mark the start of the Sahara Desert much further east. Alternatively, head into the snow-capped Atlas Mountains that hover on the horizon, where you can hike in green valleys or, in winter, ski at Oukaimeden in this country of varied pleasures.