What can I do in Morocco in 4 days?

Four days is short, and the kindest thing I can tell you is to resist the loop. People land with a mental map of Marrakech-Fes-Sahara-coast and try to thread all of it through 96 hours; what they actually get is a blur of motorway and a phone full of photos they can't place. With four days I plant you in one city and let you breathe, then I give you exactly one big adventure off the back of it.

My standard four-day shape is two nights in Marrakech to open and close, with a desert overnight wedged in the middle. Day one you arrive and ease into the medina — Jemaa el-Fnaa at dusk, a riad rooftop, the smell of grilling lamb and orange blossom. Day two is the proper Marrakech day: the Bahia Palace, the Saadian Tombs, the Majorelle and Secret Gardens, a long lunch, the souks when the light goes amber.

Days three and four are your dunes. If you want real Sahara feel without the punishing drive, I send you over the Atlas to Zagora for a camel walk and a night under stars; if time is truly tight, the Agafay stone desert is forty minutes out and still gives you a candlelit camp and total silence. Either way you're back in Marrakech by the fourth afternoon with a clean head and a flight to catch.

What I won't do is promise you Fes as well. Fes is five hours from Marrakech and deserves two unhurried days of its own — bolting it on means a dawn departure and a city seen through a windscreen. Four days is a confident, well-fed taste of Morocco, not a survey of it. Come back for the rest; almost everyone does.