Meknes

Moulay Ismail came to power in 1672 and spent the next fifty-five years building a city that would make Versailles look modest. He had seen what his contemporaries were constructing in France — Louis XIV began Versailles in 1661 — and understood power as architecture. He built walls forty kilometres long around his new capital, a royal city of palaces, granaries, and stables that could house 12,000 horses. He employed 25,000 Christian slaves, 30,000 political prisoners, and a workforce of engineers drawn from across the empire. He died in 1727 at the age of eighty-one, still building.

Meknes fell to an earthquake in 1755 — the same earthquake that destroyed Lisbon and ended the Roman city of Volubilis thirty kilometres to the north. Much of what Moulay Ismail had built collapsed. What remains is enough to understand what was intended. The Bab Mansour, the gate to the imperial city, is one of the finest pieces of Moroccan architecture in existence: twenty metres tall, covered entirely in zellige tile and carved stucco, flanked by marble columns taken from Volubilis. It was completed in 1732, five years after Moulay Ismail's death.

The heri es-Souani — the royal granaries — are the most surprising structure in the city. Vast underground halls, vaulted and thick-walled to maintain cool temperatures year-round, built to store grain and feed the 12,000 horses stabled nearby. The roof gardens above have been cleared. The scale of the halls — each vault rising eight metres — is not architectural ambition but agricultural necessity. The horses ate well.

Meknes is thirty kilometres from Fes by road and receives perhaps a tenth of the visitors. The medina is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and functions as a working city in a way that Fes, increasingly, does not — fewer tourists per square metre, fewer people employed to steer them toward shops. The food in the stalls around Place el-Hedim, the square outside Bab Mansour, is the best argument for the city: harira soup, msemen folded to order, mechoui that has been roasting since dawn.

Volubilis is thirty-three kilometres north on a road through olive groves and spring wildflowers. The Roman city was inhabited from the third century BCE to the eighth century CE — a span that makes the Roman occupation feel like an episode rather than the whole story. The floor mosaics are extraordinary, preserved because the site was abandoned rather than built over. The triumphal arch of Caracalla, built in 217 CE, stands largely intact. The site is best visited in the morning before the tour buses from Fes and Marrakech arrive.

The train from Casablanca takes three hours. From Fes, forty minutes. Meknes works as a day trip from Fes but deserves an overnight if you plan to visit Volubilis at dawn and the medina in the late afternoon, which is the correct sequence.