Fes is a cacophony of information and texture and noise. The medina is a paradoxical city; a city of buildings in which you never really can see a building. It is sort of a forest for the trees thing.

Edith Wharton, in her 1920 travel book In Morocco wrote of Fez: “There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces, and towers sliding over the plain’s edge in a rush dammed here and there by barriers of cypress and ilex, but growing more precipitous as the ravine of the Fez narrows downward with the fall of the river. It is as though some powerful enchanter, after decreeing that the city should be hurled into the depths, had been moved by its beauty, and with a wave of his wand held it suspended above destruction.”

How could you not go there after that intro?


Dinner, bartered for...

...and taken home.



One of the 200 fountains in Fes, a water source for the inhabitants of the city. The waterlines that service these are so old and undocumented that many are not working simply because no one knows how to fix them.





This is what it feels like in the main vein of Fes.






Copyright Estate of Anthony Vail Sloan 2009