Meknes

Meknes is the overlooked imperial city — which is another way of saying it is the one you can visit without the crowds, and the one where the monuments still have space around them. Sultan Moulay Ismail built it as his personal capital in the seventeenth century, and the scale of his ambition is evident everywhere: forty kilometres of walls, a granary that could hold enough grain to feed an army for twenty years, stables for twelve thousand horses.

The comparison to Versailles is accurate in intention if not in style. Moulay Ismail was a contemporary of Louis XIV and equally convinced that architecture was the most direct expression of power. He built the Bab Mansour, still one of the most elaborately decorated gates in Morocco, as the entrance to his imperial precinct. The Heri es-Souani granary — the grain store and stables — is vast and half-ruined and extraordinary.

The medina itself is a Unesco World Heritage site and the most navigable of Morocco's four imperial cities. The Place el-Hedim, the main square, functions as a smaller Jemaa el-Fna — food stalls, musicians, storytellers in the evenings. The Bou Inania Madrasa, older than its more famous namesake in Fes, is exquisite and almost always empty.

An hour's drive north, the Roman ruins of Volubilis — the best-preserved Roman site in North Africa, with mosaics still in place on the floors of houses abandoned in the third century. Moulay Idriss, the holy city on the hill above Volubilis, where the founder of the Idrisid dynasty is buried.