Is driving in the Marrakech or Fes medinas possible — or a nightmare?

This one has a clear, firm answer: you do not drive into the medina, and trying to is a genuine nightmare that I'd spare anyone. The old cities of Marrakech and Fes are medieval labyrinths built for foot traffic, donkeys and handcarts centuries before cars existed. Fes el-Bali in particular is one of the largest car-free urban areas on earth — thousands of alleys, many too narrow for a vehicle and most barred to them anyway.

Picture the reality if you ignored that: alleys that pinch to barely shoulder-width, blind corners every few metres, walls scraping your mirrors, mopeds and porters and shoppers flowing around you, dead ends you can't reverse out of, and no possible place to stop. People who've drifted in by mistake describe twenty-minute panics trying to extract a car from a souk. It is stressful, it damages the car, and it blocks the life of the medina for everyone in it.

So the system everyone uses is simple. You park your car at a guarded lot or a recognised parking area just outside the medina walls — near a gate like Bab Doukkala in Fes or one of the lots ringing the Marrakech medina — and from there you walk in, or your riad sends a porter with a cart (a charrette) to wheel your luggage through the alleys to the door. Riads are well practised at this; tell them your arrival time and they'll arrange the handover at a meeting point.

Driving is fine, of course, in the villes nouvelles — the modern districts like Guéliz in Marrakech or the Ville Nouvelle in Fes have normal streets, traffic and parking. It's purely the historic walled medina that's off-limits to your car. If your riad is deep inside the old city (the most atmospheric ones usually are), your relationship with your rental car ends at the wall and resumes when you leave town.

This is precisely why so many visitors don't keep a car during their city stays at all. You explore the medina entirely on foot — the only way to really see it — use petit taxis for anything further, and pick the car (or a driver) back up for the road legs between cities. For the medinas themselves, the best vehicle is your own two feet.