Can you do a street art tour of Morocco?

Street art is the unexpected side of Morocco that delights guests who think the country is all medieval medinas and desert. There is a real, growing urban-art movement here, and it has produced some striking work. Rabat hosts the Jidar street-art festival, which has filled the modern capital with large-scale murals by Moroccan and international artists, and Casablanca — the country's commercial, forward-looking city — has a scattering of bold pieces that reward a wander through its art-deco and contemporary districts. It is a side of urban Morocco that most tourists walk straight past.

The most charming destination for this theme, though, is Asilah on the northern Atlantic coast. This small, whitewashed medina hosts an annual arts festival during which artists paint murals directly onto the houses and ramparts, so the entire old town becomes an open-air gallery that refreshes year on year. Wandering its blue-and-white lanes, turning a corner to find a vivid new mural against the lime-washed walls, with the Atlantic just beyond the ramparts, is a genuinely lovely few hours and a complete change of pace from the bigger cities.

I like to design these tours so the contemporary art talks to the traditional. Morocco's visual culture did not begin with spray paint — it runs through zellige geometry, calligraphy, Berber textile motifs and the saturated colours of the souks — and many of today's muralists draw directly on that heritage. Pairing a street-art walk with a visit to a traditional craft workshop or a calligraphy demonstration shows guests the thread connecting a fourteenth-century tile pattern to a twenty-first-century mural, which is far more interesting than treating the street art in isolation.

A note of honesty on expectations: Morocco's street-art scene is real but still relatively young and concentrated in specific places, so this works best as a themed thread woven through a wider trip rather than as a stand-alone week. Some festival murals also fade or are painted over between editions, so the exact pieces you see vary. I keep the route current and pair it with the cities' broader culture, so design-minded and younger travellers in particular get a fresh, modern read on a country usually sold purely on its ancient face.