IN 1967, just after leaving school, my chums Eamon and Catherine and I went to Tangiers.
By: Simon Callow
But was it the real Morocco? There was, I knew, another Morocco, inland, and I vowed to see it
It was a pretty bold thing of us to do and it was extraordinary, astonishing, gob-smacking. But was it the real Morocco? There was, I knew, another Morocco, inland, and towards the Atlas mountains, and one day I vowed to see it. Its name was Fez.
Finally, this year, I made it there, with my partner Sebastian. We had only ten days, and we went via Marrakech. I was utterly wiped out after 12 weeks of Charles Dickens in the West End, and in the grip of a vile virus. All I wanted was to be cossetted.
The rose bushes at Marrakech airport, made an excellent start. It was roses, roses all the way to the hotel, down the great motorways leading to the centre, where the Riad el-Fenn, is wonderfully conveniently but secretly located.
The reception is in a courtyard, open, of course, to the air, high, high up, its space filled with bird song, the splashing of a fountain, orange trees heavy with fruit, shafts of slatted light through shadows, a sultry Moroccan pop song. And I don’t know why, but I wanted to burst into tears. The beauty, the delicacy of it all, the sweetness, the lightness. That’s Morocco.
It certainly is at Riad El Fenn, which is in fact two Riads – grand town houses – merged to create an Escher-like house of illusions, with staircases apparently going nowhere leading to saunas, bars, restaurants. The room – high ceiling, huge fire-place, vast double bed, camel leather panels on the floor, the biggest walk in shower you’ve ever seen – is like a hotel all by itself.
Up on the terrace, the view of Marrakech is heart-stopping: the air crystal clear, the sky cloudless; the snow-capped mountains stretching out across the horizon. As if hanging in mid-air, the green minaret of the great Mosque looms over us; dogs bark with a sound like the mooing of a hundred cows, muezzins across the city come to life to call the faithful to prayer.
Beyond, at night, the square heaves with snake charmers, story-tellers, fortune-tellers, men with monkeys, women applying tattoos, games of skill and chance. This is a timeless world: the same scenes surely played out in Elizabethan England, in Ancient Rome.
The square heaves with snake charmers, story-tellers, fortune-tellers, men with monkeys…
But Marrakech is a big cosmopolitan city, which has always attracted the glamorous and the great.
But Marrakech is a big cosmopolitan city, which has always attracted the glamorous and the great: Yves Saint-Laurent lived here and built a famous garden with cactuses and luridly coloured pots. Winston Churchill was a regular visitor at the legendary La Mamounia Hotel, which is to the Ritz or the George V in Paris, what the QE II is to a tugboat. There’s something of Hollywood about it, but this is beyond the wildest dreams of the maddest mogul: the swimming pool alone is the size of Burbank.
Palm trees soar heavenwards; everything is finished in red and black and chrome; there are three world-class restaurants. We choose Le Marocain, the Moroccan one, of course, and the tasting menu is sublime.
After three delirious days at the El Fenn, which is the perfect antidote to La Mamounia, we moved, just because we could, to the fairly new Amanjena, outside of town. At its centre is a vast swimming pool. The rooms are distributed around the pool and beyond; each is a little dwelling of its own, self-contained, with its own garden.
Here, if you wish, you can eat by your own fountain, served by excellent, sharply uniformed, white-gloved waiters. There is, too, a Thai restaurant: not entirely idiomatic in feel, though the food was fine. You can be pummelled and scraped and doused to within an inch of your life by strong men in the hammam, and then you can be more sedately massaged by serene young women in the spa.
And you can play golf in the very extensive course attached to the hotel. But you might feel as if you were in Esher when you do it, despite the blue sky. We preferred to skip back to town, to the Ville Nouvelle and the Café des Postes, which is as close to the Tangiers I knew (or indeed Casablanca) as Marrakech gets: a place of sweeping staircases and tables scattered across the several floors of the establishment. The feeling is 1920’s French colonial, the menu internationally exotic, with excellent wines, both Moroccan French, and a palpable atmosphere of banter and scandal and romance.
Fez is a revelation, a vision, like nowhere else on earth
But Fes was the magnet. We were impatient for it, and set off after five days, taking the train, 7 hours (via Casablanca and Rabat), through the stations planted with orange trees, through the green hills filled with grazing beasts, down to the sea and back up into the mountains. The Riad Fes has a fairytale entrance through a walled garden; being in the hotel is like being entertained by a minor Sultan.
We knew we needed a guide in Fes: Mahomet Aziz was the man. Through the souk he took us, swiftly spinning us past the huge array of shops, selling cakes, bread, chickens oblivious of their destiny still assertively clucking, as fascinating facts poured out of him, while he deftly deflected over-zealous vendors. The Medina of Fes is the oldest in Morocco and the mosque at its centre is the oldest in the country; touching to see the faithful bathing their feet and fervently praying in the pristine courtyard right in the midst of the bustle of the market.
Aziz found us a superb restaurant nearby (Chicken tagine with almonds: beyond belief), then took us to the carpet factory and the tannery, in both of which men are doing exactly what their ancestors have done for fifteen centuries and more. Later he took us to the Jewish quarter, where there are now few Jews to be found, but where the architecture is subtly and distinctly different; Jews – especially in Fes, the first great commercial centre – have been central to Moroccan life from the beginning.
On the hills above the city is the pottery, where a young guy ran up a tagine pot and its lid, perfectly fitting, in minutes: craft is everywhere, and the walls of the most ordinary place are decorated with the results of the craftsmen’s labour and the vendors of that work can be pretty persistent.
When we went up into the mid-Atlas, Aziz took us all the way, taking us to the waterfalls outside Sefrou, to visit the old woman who lived in a cave in the village of Hallel, to meet the Barbary Apes in the snowy mountains, and, most astonishing of all, to have lunch in the ski resort of Efrane, where it is impossible not to believe that you are in the Swiss Alps.
Fez is a revelation, a vision, like nowhere else on earth.
