Prices for a week at the hotel start at £554 per person, based on two sharing and include return flights and airport taxes but not transfers. Le Lido treatments are extra with daily prices for thalassotherapy starting at £47. Morocco Made to Measure (tel: 020 7235 0123; email: clmltd aol ).12 Horse riding Explore the beautiful mountain scenery of the Draa Valley with Ride World Wide (tel: 01837 82544; net: www.rideworldwide.co.uk) The seven-day trip finishes at Zagora on the edge of the desert and much of the riding is through mountainous desert terrain and lush green valleys. The price is £900 per person, based on two sharing, and includes transfers from the airport, hotel accommodation and meals, but excludes flights..

Marrakesh may be more fashionable, and Tangier more cosmopolitan, but if you want an undiluted taste of traditional Morocco, then head for Fez, the oldest and best preserved of the country’s four “imperial cities”. Fassis – its citizens – claim to have the finest cuisine, the best poets, and the most beautiful mosques and religious colleges in the land. And hidden behind its massive, 14th-century ramparts, Fez el Bali (as the Old City is known) still lives in a bygone age. Marrakesh may be more fashionable, and Tangier more cosmopolitan, but if you want an undiluted taste of traditional Morocco, then head for Fez, the oldest and best preserved of the country’s four “imperial cities”. Fassis – its citizens – claim to have the finest cuisine, the best poets, and the most beautiful mosques and religious colleges in the land. And hidden behind its massive, 14th-century ramparts, Fez el Bali (as the Old City is known) still lives in a bygone age.
The whole of Fez el Bali has been declared a Unesco conservation area, and many of its crumbling palaces and caravanserai are now being restored. But it’s not just the narrow alleyways, curling back on themselves between overhaning houses, that made me feel I’d been transported back in time It’s the way of life.

For here is an entire city that lives by the old rules, with its merchants and craftsmen organised by guilds, each occupying their own carefully defined quarter, as they have done ever since the city was founded in the 8th century.No motor vehicle can enter the city gates except the smallest of motocyclettes, and even these negotiate the labyrinth of alleys and steps with difficulty In Fez el Bali, the donkey is still king of the road. Everything that enters or exits, from raw wool and firewood to cooking pots and elaborately tooled book-bindings, goes on their backs. And there are plenty of warning cries of “Balak!”, as another caravan squeezes past. For this is not just a souk or market place, where goods are bought and sold. It is a living centre of production, with its tanneries and dye-pits, its coppersmiths and woodworking quarters, all of them governed by medieval craft traditions.It was by chance that I met one of these master craftsmen.

His name was Azzedine, though I came to know him as the Master of Patterns. I was sitting by the pool at my hotel in the French colonial-style ville nouvelle, along with my wife and a friend who is a curious mixture of Greek and Scots – and has a sense of humour to match – when an enormous German woman emerged from the changing rooms and belly-flopped into the deep end.”There,” my friend observed, “we have a perfect demonstration of Archimedes’ principle.” And it was true. The German lady did seem to have displaced an awful lot of water which was now flooding the poolside.No sooner than he’d spoken the word “Archimedes”, the Moroccans sitting at the table next to us began giggling uncontrollably “But it’s true!” my friend protested “Absolument!” they agreed. This started a conversation, by the end of which Azzedine had explained that he was a master craftsman working in zellij, and his wife had invited us all to lunch.Now, of all the crafts that flourish in this city of craftsmen, the zellij is one of the most demanding and, for me, most characteristic of the country. It is a form of mosaic, which is boldly coloured and intricately worked into geometric abstractions that tease and delight the eye. The technique may have developed first in Andalusia, before being introduced to Fez by Muslim craftsmen fleeing the Spanish. The city still has its Andalusian Quarter.The next day, Azzedine took us to the family house, where his wife fed us a delicious couscous (“to taste the true couscous, you must eat in the home”).

Afterwards, over mint tea, Azzedine explained that he was working on a large panel for one of the King of Morocco’s palaces, although previous commissions had taken him all over the world. He has even re-created one of Fez’s celebrated fountains for a theme park in Florida.”For this work,” he told me, “you need an aptitude for mathematics and a good memory.” When he took me to his workshop I began to see why. It is not just that everything is done by hand, from baking the special clay from the Atlas mountains through to cutting the pigmented tablets into a thousand different hexagons and lozenges and star-shapes – it is the next stage, the ordering of these tiny fragments into a preconceived, harmonious design, that seems miraculous. “Each piece has its own name,” he told me, “and in making the zellij I have to know precisely where every piece has gone.”That’s where the memory comes in. First, the design is etched on to a soft plaster mould, which may be flat or indented or dome shaped, tailored to fit the building that is to embellish. On to this mould each coloured fragment is pressed face down. Someone has to keep the grand design in mind and know what colours and shapes to add next, and in this co-operative (there are some 80 co-owners) that person is Azzedine.