The Medina of Fez is the walled historic core of Fez (Fès), a city of about 1.26 million people (2024 census) in northern inland Morocco, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1981. The listing covers two old towns: Fes el-Bali ("Old Fes"), founded by the Idrisid dynasty between 789 and 808, and Fes Jdid ("New Fes"), the royal district the Marinid sultans added in 1276. Fes el-Bali is the larger and older of the two, and at roughly 300 hectares it is one of the biggest car-free urban areas in the world, a maze of souk streets and dead-end lanes around the al-Qarawiyyin mosque-university, founded in 857 or 859. What holds it together, and what explains its shape, is water: a medieval network of canals that splits the Fez River into dozens of channels and runs them through houses, mosques, mills and tanneries before collecting them again in a single ravine.
Ras al-Ma to Bab Bou Jeloud: how the canals of Fes el-Bali work
The Oued Fes, a tributary of the Sebou, begins at Ras al-Ma ("Head of the Water"), a spring in lake limestone 12 km south-west of the city with a flow of about 500 litres a second. Several streams from the Saïss Plain feed it. Its main branch, the Oued al-Jawahir or "River of Pearls", skirts the Royal Palace and Fes Jdid before reaching the old city, where it is diverted again and again on the way down.
The present system was laid out in the 11th century. The Zenata emir Dunas ibn Hamama began it between 1037 and 1049, and the Almoravid ruler Yusuf ibn Tashfin extended it between his conquest of Fez in 1069 and his death in 1106. The arrangement works like this:
- First split. Below the ramparts of the Old Mechouar, beside the Jnan Sbil Gardens, the river emerges from four arched openings and divides into four main canal systems: the Oued Fejjalin, the Oued el-Hamiya, the Sakiyyat el-Abbasa and the Oued Shrashar.
- The Bou Jeloud distributor. One branch of the Fejjalin, the Oued el-Lemtiyyin, enters the walls next to Bab Bou Jeloud gate and fills a brick and rammed-earth distribution building dating from the Almoravid period. Its three arched openings feed three open channels at different heights. The middle one holds a large reservoir that feeds three underground canals; the two higher ones either side received less water and split it among neighbourhoods through small basins.
- Priority by elevation. Those height differences were the law in physical form. Neighbourhoods and buildings with priority water rights drew from the lower channels and reservoirs; those with lesser rights were served by higher ones and got water only when the level rose high enough to reach them. Small dams and settling basins in the distributor slowed the water and caught rubbish, acting as a basic treatment stage.
- Clean and dirty kept apart. Within each network, channels for drinking and washing ran separately from those that carried waste away.
- A second network for the east bank. Streams south of the city fed the Oued Masmuda, which entered through a grilled culvert called Bab ash-Shobbak and supplied most of the Andalus quarter. Its name points to the Masmuda Berber confederation behind the Almohad movement.
Most of these canals now run underground, and street names are often the only trace of the bridges that once crossed them; Qantrat Bou Rous on the Tala'a Kebira is one. One canal still flows openly through the courtyard of the Bou Inania Madrasa.
Norias, the Chouara vats and the Dar al-Magana clock
Water in Fez did work as well as supplying homes. Waterwheels, called norias, lifted water and drove machinery all over the network. The largest recorded, built to irrigate the Marinid royal gardens of Mosara, measured 26 m across and 2 m thick. Only a few survive in any form, some near the Jnan Sbil Gardens.
The tanneries depended on the same water, and they still stand beside the river. The Almohads, according to the 14th-century historian al-Jazna'i, counted 86 tanning workshops in the city, and a later source puts the number near a hundred under the Marinids. Three tanneries remain: Sidi Moussa, recorded with some certainty from the early 12th century; Ain Azliten in the north, created in the late 18th century; and Chouara, the largest, beside the Saffarin Madrasa on the river. At Chouara, hides of cows, sheep, goats and camels spend two to three days in white vats of quicklime, salt, water, cow urine and pigeon droppings to soften them, then move to dye pits coloured with poppy for red, indigo for blue and henna for orange, before drying in the sun. The work is done entirely by hand.
Water also kept time. Opposite the Bou Inania Madrasa, built by Sultan Abu Inan Faris between 1350 and 1355, stands the Dar al-Magana, a water clock that al-Jazna'i says was completed on 6 May 1357. Its designer, the timekeeper Abu al-Hassan ibn Ali el-Tlemsani, arranged twelve small doors above twelve brass bowls. A float on a slowly draining reservoir presumably pulled a cart behind the doors; each hour one door opened and a metal ball dropped into a bowl. The mechanism stopped generations ago, and its bowls were removed in 2004 for a restoration by ADER-Fès that has struggled with a lack of records about how it worked.
Oued Bou Khrareb: one ravine, two cities and their bridges
All of the canals end in the same place. The lowest line through the medina is the Oued Bou Khrareb, the river's main urban course, which gathers used water from both banks and carries it north-east out of the city between Bab Guissa and the site of Bab Sidi Bou Jida, to join the Sebou a short distance beyond.
That ravine is also the city's oldest political boundary. Idris I founded a town on the east bank in 789; in 809 his son Idris II founded a second on the west bank. Refugees from Córdoba settled the first and refugees from Kairouan the second, giving the two shores the names they still carry: the Andalus quarter ('Adwat al-Andalus) on the east and the Qarawiyyin quarter on the west. The two towns grew separately until the Almoravids joined them inside one wall in the 11th century. Al-Qarawiyyin, named after the Kairouan families, was founded by Fatima al-Fihri; the Mosque of the Andalusians across the river is traditionally attributed to her sister.
Bridges stitched the halves together. Al-Jazna'i records six built by Yusuf ibn Tashfin; many were wrecked by floods in 1324 or 1325, and some were rebuilt by the Marinid sultan Abu Sa'id. Three main crossings survive: the Qantrat Bin el-Mudun ("Bridge Between the Two Cities") among rocky rapids in the north; the Qantrat Sebbaghin, the Bridge of the Tanners; and the Qantrat Terrafin, the Bridge of the Cobblers, beside Place R'cif and the only bridge in Fez lined with shops on both sides. The Terrafin and Sebbaghin bridges were restored in the 2010s.
Souk streets, derbs and 300 car-free hectares
On top of the water network sits a street system with its own logic. As in many medieval Islamic cities, the main souk streets run from the principal gates, Bab Mahrouk, Bab Guissa and Bab Ftouh, plus the later Bab Bou Jeloud, towards the main mosques. Merchants' inns (funduqs), workshops and the larger monuments line those streets, the Tala'a Kebira, which climbs from Bab Bou Jeloud past the Bou Inania, among them. Off them branch the derbs, residential lanes that often end in a blind alley. Historians describe four main centres of gravity: the Qarawiyyin, the Mosque of the Andalusians, the Bou Inania Madrasa and, separately, Fes Jdid.
Because those lanes are too tight for vehicles, Fes el-Bali remains a car-free district of about 300 hectares. A single road penetrates it from the south, laid over the river as far as Place R'cif, so buses and emergency vehicles can reach the centre. Early 20th-century records by the historian Roger Le Tourneau list 18 neighbourhoods, a division close to one given in a 14th-century chronicle; names such as el-Kettanin ("the Textile Merchants") and Funduq el-Yihudi, the Jewish community's quarter before the Mellah was built in Fes Jdid, still map trades and communities onto streets.
The city's high point came under the Marinids, who moved the capital back to Fez in the 13th century and built Morocco's first true madrasas, including al-Attarin and as-Sahrij as well as the Bou Inania. In the Almohad period before them, Fez may have held about 200,000 people and been among the largest cities in the world.
From the 1981 listing to Aziza Chaouni's river plan
A colonial decision shaped the medina's modern condition. After the Treaty of Fes made Morocco a French protectorate in 1912, the capital moved to Rabat, and Resident General Hubert Lyautey chose to leave the old walled cities largely untouched and build a Ville Nouvelle outside each one. That preserved the canals, bridges and souks, but it also froze investment. Better-off families moved to the new town between the wars, and the medina filled with poorer migrants from the countryside.
UNESCO identifies two main threats to the site: overcrowding with uncontrolled building, and the decay of old structures. Since 1989 the agency ADER-Fès has restored monuments and houses and tried to thin out the most crowded districts. A design competition backed by the US Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Moroccan government reshaped Place Lalla Yeddouna, with work due for completion in 2016, to keep artisan workshops and residents in the heart of the medina.
The water system is the hardest part to save. Oued Bou Khrareb means "River of Filth"; sewage, rubbish and tannery waste, especially chromium used since the 19th century, poisoned it, and residents built walls to block the smell while the city authorities began covering exposed stretches with concrete slabs. From the late 2000s a rehabilitation led by the architect Aziza Chaouni set out to clean the river, recreate lost wetlands, restore canals and open walkways along the banks at Place R'cif and Place Lalla Yeddouna. An early idea to move the Chouara Tannery out of the medina was dropped; the tannery was restored in place. The city's drinking water comes from upstream, but pollution still affects towns along the Sebou downstream.
Fez is one of several Moroccan cities shaped by dynasties that moved the capital back and forth; our guide to Marrakech covers the city that replaced it under the Almoravids, and Morocco's geography explains the plains and mountains the Oued Fes drains. Before visiting the medina's open-air tanneries, it helps to check the best time to visit Morocco, since summer heat makes the vats hard going.