Day Trips

Rabat is an hour up the coast from Casablanca and it is the easiest full day out of the city. It is also the quietest of the imperial capitals: a walled medina that people still live in, a kasbah of white and blue lanes above the river mouth, and a Roman and Merinid necropolis half swallowed by its own garden.

South of Casablanca the coast turns Portuguese. Azemmour is a white town of painted walls above the Oum Er-Rbia river; El Jadida, an hour further on, was Mazagan, a fortified Portuguese port held until 1769 and now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Two and a half hours of motorway separate Casablanca from Marrakech, which makes the red city a long but entirely workable day. You leave early, spend the middle of the day inside the medina, and come back in the evening.

Fes el-Bali is the largest car-free urban area in the world and the oldest continuously inhabited medina in Morocco. Getting there from Casablanca takes three hours each way, which makes this the longest of the single-day trips and the one that needs the earliest start.

Chefchaouen sits in the Rif mountains, four hours north of Casablanca, and it is blue for reasons nobody entirely agrees on. What is not in doubt is what it looks like: a hillside medina painted in a dozen shades of indigo, with the mountains directly behind it.

Three places within twenty minutes of each other, and each one a different Morocco. Volubilis is a Roman provincial capital with its mosaics still on the floor where they were laid. Moulay Idriss, on the hill above it, is the town built around the tomb of the man who founded the first Moroccan dynasty. Meknes is the imperial city Moulay Ismail built in the 17th century, and it is enormous.

Africa's first high-speed line runs from Casablanca to Tangier, and it changes what is possible in a day. What would be three and a half hours of motorway becomes just over two hours on the train, which buys back most of an afternoon at the other end.