The caravan routes Marrakech inherited

Marrakech was founded in the 1070s by the Almoravid dynasty at a point specifically chosen for control of trade routes running north from the Sahara, and for several centuries the city's fortunes rose and fell with the caravans that crossed the desert carrying gold, salt and other goods, a trade that also, and this needs stating plainly, carried enslaved people north across the same routes. The souks that still sprawl through the old medina are a direct descendant of that trading function: not a market built for visitors, but the commercial heart of a city whose entire founding logic was controlling the exchange of goods moving between West Africa and the Mediterranean.

A market organised the old way

Marrakech's souks retain a structure that predates modern retail entirely, organised by trade guild rather than by convenience: a street of dyers, a street of metalworkers, a quarter given over to leather, another to spices, each cluster having occupied roughly the same ground for generations. The spice quarter is the one that tends to catch a first-time visitor's attention hardest, stalls stacked with pyramids of cumin, paprika, turmeric and ras el hanout, a spice blend whose name translates roughly as "head of the shop", traditionally meaning a merchant's own top blend of whatever combination of spices they considered their best.

What the trade routes brought to the table

Moroccan cooking carries the trace of this history fairly openly: saffron, ginger and cinnamon, none of them native to Morocco, arrived via trade routes stretching east and south, and became embedded enough in everyday cooking, in tagines, in mint tea, in pastries, that they now read as simply Moroccan rather than as imports. The tagine itself, a stew slow-cooked in the conical clay vessel that gives the dish its name, developed as a practical response to available fuel and ingredients as much as to taste: long, low, even cooking that suited scarce firewood and tougher cuts of meat, built to feed a household from limited resources.

Fes, and a different kind of specialism

Further north, Fes developed its own trading identity around craft rather than raw goods, its tanneries among the most visible surviving example: hides dyed and cured in stone vats arranged in a honeycomb pattern, using techniques that have changed remarkably little since the medieval period, feeding a leather trade that supplied saddles, bags and shoes across a wide network of Moroccan and trans-Saharan markets. The smell, famously, is not for everyone, and guides at the tanneries have long offered visitors sprigs of mint to hold against their nose, a small, practical accommodation for a trade that has never had much reason to worry about being sold on scent alone.

Mint tea, and the ritual of the pour

Mint tea, green tea steeped with fresh mint and a generous amount of sugar, is offered widely enough across Morocco, in shops, in homes, at the end of a long negotiation over a carpet or a lamp, that it counts as one of the country's most consistently documented traditions of hospitality. The pour itself, held high above the glass to raise a light froth on the surface, is as much a piece of showmanship as a serving method, and it has become closely enough associated with Moroccan hospitality that it now appears, in one form or another, on the menu of Moroccan restaurants well beyond the country's own borders, a small but genuine piece of cultural export riding alongside the spices and the leatherwork.

When to go

The souks operate year-round, but the covered alleys of the medina offer welcome shade in the hotter months and can feel closer and more crowded in midsummer heat than in the milder air of spring and autumn, which suit the walking involved in a proper circuit of the markets rather better.