Meknes: A Gentle Guide to Morocco's Calmest Imperial City

Morocco has four imperial cities, and three of them are famous for the crowds inside their walls. Meknes is the fourth — and the quiet one. Sultan Moulay Ismail built it to rival Versailles, then history moved the capital elsewhere, and the enormous gates and granaries he left behind have been standing in the sunshine ever since, largely to themselves.

For anyone who has found Marrakech or Fes a little relentless, that changes everything. Meknes still has a walled medina and a maze of souks, but it also has something the other imperial cities lack: space. Its great square, Place el-Hedim, is flat and open, ringed with cafés, and you can see the city's single most famous monument — the gate of Bab Mansour — from a chair, with a glass of mint tea in your hand.

This is a guide to Meknes at an unhurried pace: what to see, how far apart it all is, where the stairs and slopes are, and why a day and a half here may be the most restful part of a Moroccan trip.

A little history

Meknes sits on a plateau in northern Morocco, in the Fès-Meknès region, with the Middle Atlas rising to the south and rolling farmland all around. It was founded in the eleventh century by the Almoravids as a garrison town, and its name comes from the Meknassa, a Berber tribe of the area.

Its great moment came much later. In the 1670s, Moulay Ismail — founder of the Alaouite dynasty, which still reigns in Morocco today — chose Meknes as his capital and spent more than half a century building. He raised kilometres of walls, a string of monumental gates, palaces, barracks, stables, granaries and a vast reservoir, creating a royal city larger than the old medina beside it. Historians have called it a Moroccan Versailles, and the two courts did exchange embassies.

After his death in 1727 the capital drifted back to Fes and later Rabat, and Meknes was left half-finished, its ambitions frozen in stone. UNESCO inscribed the historic city on the World Heritage list in 1996. That interrupted history is exactly why it feels calm today: the monuments are imperial in scale, but the tourism around them never quite caught up.

Bab Mansour, the monumental gate at the heart of historic Meknes.

What to see

Everything below sits in two clusters: the medina side of Place el-Hedim, and the old imperial city just across from it. Each cluster is walkable; between the second cluster and the granaries, take a taxi.

Bab Mansour and Place el-Hedim

Bab Mansour is the grandest gateway in Morocco, a broad arch flanked by bastions, sheathed in green and white tilework and carried on antique marble columns thought to have come from the Roman ruins at Volubilis. It was begun under Moulay Ismail and finished in the early 1730s, under his son Moulay Abdallah. It is best appreciated from outside, from the square — no climbing required.

That square is Place el-Hedim, a large, flat, paved open space with cafés along one side and a covered food market off a corner. It is a gentler cousin of Marrakech's famous square: lively in the early evening, but never overwhelming, and with plenty of places to sit.

The Mausoleum of Moulay Ismail

A few minutes' level walk beyond the gate is the resting place of the sultan himself, a quiet sequence of courtyards with fountains, zellij tilework and carved plaster. Non-Muslim visitors have traditionally been welcomed into the outer courts; dress modestly, and ask at your riad before setting out, as the building has closed for restoration in the past.

Heri es-Souani and the Agdal basin

This is the most memorable place in Meknes and the one most travellers miss. Heri es-Souani is Moulay Ismail's granary and storehouse: rank after rank of thick walls and arches, cool and dim inside, built to hold grain for a besieged city, with the ruined royal stables spreading out alongside. Next to it lies the Agdal basin, an enormous rectangular reservoir that fed the gardens and the palace. The scale is astonishing and the atmosphere, on a warm afternoon, is almost monastic.

Dar Jamaï and the medina

Dar Jamaï is a late nineteenth-century palace built for a powerful vizier's family, with painted cedar ceilings, a shaded courtyard garden and collections of Moroccan ceramics, textiles, woodwork and jewellery. Behind it, the covered souks of the medina are noticeably less pressured than those of Fes — carpenters, embroiderers, spice sellers, and far fewer people telling you where to go.

Bou Inania Madrasa

A fourteenth-century Marinid religious college near the Grand Mosque: a small, perfect courtyard of carved stucco and cedar, with tiny student cells around it. There is an upper floor and a roof terrace with a fine view over the medina rooftops, reached by a steep, narrow old staircase. The courtyard alone is worth the visit if stairs are not for you.

The tiled arch and flanking bastions of Bab el Mansour in Meknes.

A day trip nearby

Two of Morocco's most atmospheric sites sit within about 30 km north of Meknes, roughly a 30- to 45-minute drive, and they pair naturally in one morning.

Volubilis is the country's finest Roman site: a provincial city on a gentle hillside, with standing arches, a basilica, a triumphal arch and — its great treasure — floor mosaics still lying in the open where the houses once stood, framed by olive groves. Be honest with yourself about the terrain: the ground is uneven, part of the walk is on a slow incline over old paving and grass, and there is almost no shade. Go early, wear firm shoes, and accept that seeing half of it slowly is better than all of it in a hurry.

Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, a few kilometres away, is a whitewashed pilgrimage town wrapped over two hilltops around the tomb of Moulay Idriss I, who brought Islam's first dynasty to Morocco. It is beautiful — and it is steep, essentially a staircase of a town. Many older travellers stop at a café or viewpoint reached by car, admire the tiers of white houses and the green tiled roofs, and leave the climbing to others. That is a perfectly good visit.

The easiest way to do both is a half-day taxi hired for the round trip from Meknes, agreed in advance with waiting time included; a small-group tour from Meknes or Fes works just as well and usually adds a guide, which Volubilis genuinely rewards.

Honest advice for comfortable travel

• Distances are kind. Place el-Hedim, Bab Mansour, the mausoleum and Dar Jamaï are all within roughly ten minutes' slow walking of one another, on mostly flat ground. Heri es-Souani is about 1.5–2 km further, along a long walled road with little shade — take a taxi both ways and save your legs for the site itself.
• Meknes is flatter than Fes. The medina has cobbles, thresholds and narrow lanes, and the ground is uneven in places, but there is nothing like the long, steep descents of the Fes medina. This is the easiest of the imperial cities to walk.
• Where to stay. A riad in the medina near Place el-Hedim puts everything at your doorstep; ask in advance about the number of stairs, as riads are built around courtyards and bedrooms are often on upper floors with no lift. If stairs are a real concern, choose a hotel in the Ville Nouvelle (Hamria) for lifts, level pavements and easy taxis, about a 10-minute drive from the monuments.
• Arriving with luggage. Cars cannot reach most medina addresses. Riads will usually send someone with a handcart to meet your taxi — arrange it when you book.
• Heat and shade. July and August regularly climb above 35 °C on this plateau. If you come in summer, do sightseeing before 11 a.m., rest in the afternoon, and carry water; Heri es-Souani's thick walls are a genuine refuge.
• Winter is cooler than people expect. Meknes sits high enough for chilly, damp evenings from December to February. Bring a warm layer and check that your room has decent heating.
• Sit-down sightseeing works here. Two or three unhurried outings with long café stops in between will show you Meknes properly. Cafés on Place el-Hedim give you a monument-sized view for the price of a tea.
• Guides and steps. A licensed local guide for half a day is good value and can route you around the worst steps and the busiest lanes. Say clearly at the start that you want a slow pace and few stairs.

Bab Mansour Gate seen from the open, level ground in front of it.

What to eat

Meknes stands in the middle of one of Morocco's richest agricultural regions — olives, grain, fruit and vineyards on the surrounding plains — and the food is accordingly generous and unfussy.

Look for tagines slow-cooked with prunes and apricots, couscous on Fridays as everywhere in Morocco, kefta (spiced minced meat, grilled or baked with egg in a clay dish) and simple grilled brochettes. Harira soup and bessara, a warming purée of dried broad beans finished with olive oil and cumin, are cheap, soft and perfect on a cool evening. Meknes is also known locally for camel meat, sold from specialist butchers in the medina and served in tagines if you are curious.

The covered market off Place el-Hedim is the pleasure of the city for anyone who enjoys food shopping: pyramids of olives in a dozen marinades, preserved lemons, dates, mountains of mint. It is level, roofed and easy to browse slowly.

For dessert, stay with what the cafés do best — almond pastries, honeyed sesame biscuits, and mint tea poured from a height. Meknes is a wine-growing region and some restaurants and hotels, mostly in the Ville Nouvelle and at the estates outside town, serve Moroccan wine; in the medina, expect tea and fruit juice instead.

Getting there

Our verdict

Meknes will not overwhelm you, and that is precisely its gift. It offers one genuinely world-class monument in Bab Mansour, one unforgettable ruin in Heri es-Souani, a medina you can wander without bracing yourself, and the finest Roman site in Morocco half an hour up the road. It gives you all of that at walking distances measured in minutes rather than kilometres, on ground that is flatter than any other imperial city in the country.

We would not send a first-time visitor to Morocco here instead of Fes or Marrakech. We would send them here as well — ideally as the pause between them, two nights in a quiet riad off Place el-Hedim, with one slow morning of monuments, one slow morning at Volubilis, and a great deal of mint tea in a square built to impress ambassadors.

Go in April or October, keep your afternoons free, and let a sultan's unfinished capital do the work.

Tilework and carved detail on Bab el-Mansur in Meknes.

“An emperor's ambition, left standing in the sun — and nobody rushing you past it.”

Photo credits

• Bab Mansour Gate Plaza el Hedim Meknes Morocco - panoramio: Hiroki Ogawa, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Bab Mansour in Meknes 2007: Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 pl via Wikimedia Commons
• Bab Mansour gate: Jerzy Strzelecki, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Bab Mansour Gate Meknes Morocco - panoramio: Hiroki Ogawa, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Bab mansour DSCF3791: Robert Prazeres, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons