Fes, Morocco

Welcome to Fes. Founded in the 9th Century, it is a former capital of Morocco and a current capital of hand crafted goods and food.

When coming to Fes, there are two main attractions.

-The Medina-
The Medina of Fes was founded in the 9th Century, but reached its heights in the 13th–14th Centuries when Fes was the capital of Morocco. It has 9454 cobbled alleyways and 300 mosques. It's footprint is an intimidating 540 acres. Walking the medina it's clear why Fes is the Morocco capital of handicrafts and cuisine.

The Medina is pretty well organized. It has many "districts" centralized around a particular craft. We wandered through woodworking souks, leather working souks, wedding and dresses souks, sweets souks, spice and systemic souls, metal working souks (with bronze on one side and copper crafts on the other) and more. Walking the alleyways, you'll get merchants presenting you their wares with loud squaks of chickens meeting their end nearby. It's definitely a place that needs a guide as getting lost would be all too easy and stories of getting miffed in dead ends are all too common online.

Still it's an amazing place and coming from a country where trade skills are all but gone it gives you plenty to ponder.

We don't have many pictures from the Medina. Many vendors ask for a few coins for getting their picture taken. While it's not much, it can add up and depends on the number of coins in your pocket at that time.

-Chouara Tanneries-
The second main attraction is the leather tannery. Everything we saw online did not prepare me for the sheer size and impressiveness of the tannery. There are many tanneries in Fes but this one is known for its size and made famous by the leather good store that has a terrace overlooking the tannery. The actual age of the tannery is not known, but there is a clear documentation of another tannery in Fes placing it in existence in the early 12th century. Other than that, no dates are known. Leather is obtained from local butchers. Hides of cows, sheep, goats, and camels are brought here to be conditioned and dyed.

The first stage is conditioning which is done in the "white wash" vats on the left of our pictures. The mixture is made from cow urine, pigeon feces, quicklime, salt, and water. The urine and pigeon feces are used as natural sources of ammonia and the process has done unchanged for hundreds of years. Modern commercial tanners use industrial ammonia (as we were told) that requires the use of face masks. Fes tanners don't require any face masks (I'll leave that open to interpretation). Hides are left in the white baths for 2-3 days! This gets the hides ready for dying and removes the hair.

After that, the larger is dyed in the colored vats on the right. Natural colors are used "such as poppy for red, indigo for blue, and henna for orange" (from Wikipedia). Side note, apparently henna isn't just a hand decoration, it's a plant. The leather is then hung put to dry in the sun. Summers in Fes can get up to +40°C or 104°F so I imagine they dry pretty quickly.

Because FindPenguins does compress and degrade our pictures a bit the below link is the full quality picture of the Chouara Tanneries. Notice all the leather drying on the walls on the right and elsewhere in the background. It was an amazingly impressive operation.
High res photo
https://photos.app.goo.gl/gLhAZJjmisKbUEWE6
Panorama
https://photos.app.goo.gl/a1LU311iPgtcH3FU8Read more