What are some surprising fun facts about Morocco?

After years of guiding here, my favourite part of a trip is watching people's assumptions about Morocco fall apart in the best way. Start with the famous one: yes, there really are goats that climb argan trees. In the south-west near Essaouira, herds of goats clamber up the thorny branches to eat the argan fruit, perching like Christmas ornaments — a genuinely strange and delightful sight (just be wary of the very staged tourist-trap versions on the main roads).

Morocco also quietly holds some world records of real weight. The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fes, founded in 859 by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, is recognised as the oldest continuously operating degree-granting university on Earth — older than Oxford or Bologna. The Fes medina is the largest car-free urban area in the world, a labyrinth of around 9,000 lanes where donkeys still do the heavy hauling. Walking it is like stepping into the medieval world, fully alive.

The landscapes refuse to behave like the cliché, too. There's Chefchaouen, the mountain town painted entirely in shades of blue; Volubilis, a remarkably preserved Roman city with mosaics still in place; cedar forests with Barbary macaques; Atlantic surf towns; and snow on the Atlas while the Sahara bakes a few hours south. You can genuinely ski and visit desert dunes in the same week. Morocco packs more variety into one country than seems fair.

And here's the fact that reframes the whole trip: Morocco is astonishingly close to Europe. The Strait of Gibraltar is only about 14 kilometres wide at its narrowest, so from the northern coast you can see Spain on a clear day, and a fast ferry crosses in around an hour. This nearness, layered over Arab, Amazigh, African and European influences across centuries, is exactly why Morocco feels at once familiar and utterly its own — a crossroads you can reach in an afternoon.