Hero photograph: Medina of Fès, 3 December 2015. Photograph by Alexey Komarov, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 3.0. Original photograph supplied without editorial alterations; display cropping may vary by screen.
Fès is a Moroccan city whose history brings together political power, religious learning, commerce and craft. Its celebrated medina is not a single foundation preserved unchanged: it grew through successive dynasties, migrations and urban projects. To understand Fès is to look beyond its monuments and recognise the homes, institutions and changing uses that make it a city rather than a collection of historic views.
The familiar image is compelling: roofs gathered around minarets, narrow passages, carved plaster and courtyards open to the sky. But a view from above can conceal as much as it reveals. It shows the density of buildings, not the relationships that give them meaning. A doorway may belong to a monument, a workshop or someone's home. The distinction matters.
A city made through successive foundations
Fès developed from foundations associated with the Idrisid dynasty between the late eighth and early ninth centuries. UNESCO describes an original settlement divided into two fortified quarters on opposite banks of the Fès river: those of the Andalous and the Kairouanais.
These names preserve the importance of connections beyond the city. Fès was not formed in isolation. Its architecture and urban culture developed through encounters involving Andalusian, North African and wider African and eastern Mediterranean influences.
In the eleventh century, the Almoravids brought the two settlements within a single enclosure. Under the Almohads, Fès el-Bali expanded; under the Marinids, another urban foundation changed the city's geography. Fès Jdid, established in 1276 west of the older settlement, accommodated the royal palace, military functions and residential areas.
Even the expression “old city” therefore needs care. What appears unified today contains different projects of government, settlement and belonging. The city was already layered long before modern preservation made that layering an object of admiration.
Knowledge as part of urban life
Fès's association with learning is inseparable from its religious and urban institutions. The Qarawiyyin occupies a central place in accounts of the city's intellectual history; madrasas and other religious buildings also form part of the monumental landscape recognised by UNESCO.
It is tempting to turn this inheritance into a competition over which institution is oldest. That question can obscure the more interesting one: how knowledge helped organise a city, establish authority and connect people across generations.
A courtyard or a decorated doorway is not simply evidence of refined taste. It belongs to an institutional setting. Looking closely means asking what a building supported as well as how it was made.
Jewish memory within the city, not outside its history
The mellah is essential to any account of Fès. Research published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2001 examines the Jewish quarter through its houses, streets and relationship with the wider city.
The study identifies both continuities and ruptures. Domestic buildings shared features with courtyard houses elsewhere in the medina, while ritual uses and decorative details could mark particular spaces. Sites retained significance even when buildings were damaged or replaced.
This is a more useful perspective than treating the mellah as an isolated curiosity. Jewish life belonged to the city's economic, domestic and cultural history. Its distinct circumstances should neither be erased by a reassuring story of effortless coexistence nor separated from the larger urban world.
The same study describes changes in the quarter's population during the twentieth century. Its account is dated evidence, not a census of the present. Remembering Fès requires attention to movement and absence as well as to surviving architecture.
The city beyond the medina
Fès did not stop developing at the walls of its historic quarters. The construction of the Ville Nouvelle under the French Protectorate introduced another urban project, shaped by colonial administration and unequal power.
Charlotte Jelidi's research on Fès between 1912 and 1956 shows that this development cannot be explained by a simple opposition between an untouched old city and a fully planned new one. Administrative ambitions, architects, residents, local elites and material circumstances contributed to a contested process.
The distinction remains important for how the city is represented. A photograph of the medina cannot stand for the whole of Fès. Nor should modern neighbourhoods appear merely as the uninteresting space between a visitor's arrival and the historic centre.
What it means to preserve a place where people live
UNESCO's account recognises the medina not only for its buildings but also for the ways of life, skills and culture that persist and are renewed within it. Its conservation assessment also records concerns about deteriorating buildings and pressures on the urban fabric.
These are not contradictory descriptions. They are the conditions of living heritage. A place can be architecturally remarkable and difficult to maintain. A house can matter to a visitor for its decoration and to its occupants for shelter, access and everyday use.
Preservation therefore involves more than restoring prestigious façades. It asks how housing, infrastructure and cultural value can be considered together. Admiring the medina should not make its residents disappear from the picture.
Craft without reducing the city to a spectacle
Workshops and commercial spaces are part of this urban history. Yet the familiar image of colourful tanning vats is only one way of looking at labour. It cannot explain the whole city, and it does not by itself establish how a particular object was made or where its materials originated.
We keep the detailed discussion of leather work separate from this portrait. Here, the larger point is that craft belongs within networks of work, exchange and urban life, not outside history as a scene that has somehow escaped change.
Culture continues to be interpreted
The Al Batha Museum of Islamic Arts offers a recent example of heritage being presented anew. According to the Fondation Nationale des Musées, the palace reopened to the public on 26 February 2025 after restoration, with a museum dedicated to Islamic arts.
The building itself has passed through different uses. Constructed in the late nineteenth century under Sultan Moulay Hassan I and completed under Moulay Abdelaziz, it became a museum in 1915. Its garden and architecture are part of the experience, alongside the collections.
Such a reopening is not simply a return to an original state. A museum selects, arranges and explains. It makes a present-day proposal about how inherited objects and places can be understood.
That is also the challenge of writing about Fès. The city deserves more than the language of timelessness. Its depth comes from the coexistence of inheritance and change, not from the absence of change.
Fès is not a city that time forgot. It is a city whose inhabitants have never stopped making time their own.
Sources and further reading
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Medina of Fez: successive urban foundations, architectural significance and conservation. The integrity and management assessments cited on the page are dated 2009.
- “Inscribing Minority Space in the Islamic City: The Jewish Quarter of Fez (1438–1912)”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2001: domestic architecture, urban relationships and the historical development of the mellah.
- Review of Charlotte Jelidi, Fès, la fabrication d’une ville nouvelle, 1912–1956, Perspective: an account of the book's archival approach to colonial urban development and its multiple actors.
- Fondation Nationale des Musées, Musée Al Batha des arts de l'Islam, and its 2025 reopening announcement: the palace's history, restoration and renewed museum role.
