What is the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music and when is it held?

If Gnaoua is Morocco’s most exuberant festival, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music is its most soulful. Born in the 1990s as a response to call for dialogue between cultures, it brings sacred and devotional music from every tradition — Sufi qawwali, Christian gospel, Jewish liturgical song, Hindu chant, Andalusian classical — to one of the oldest living medieval cities on earth.

It is held in Fes, usually spanning late May into June. The setting is half the experience: grand evening concerts at the Bab Al Makina, an enormous walled square, plus daytime performances in jewel-box venues like the Batha Museum’s Barbary fig courtyard and the Jnan Sbil gardens. There are also free nightly Sufi nights in the medina, where brotherhoods perform their hadra trance ceremonies for locals.

Expect a more contemplative, dressed-up crowd than at Gnaoua — this is music to sit with, not mosh to. I love that it gives you a reason to be in Fes in early summer, exploring the labyrinthine medina, the tanneries and the world’s oldest university by day, then watching the sun set behind a Senegalese griot or a Pakistani qawwal by night.

Worth planning around? Yes, if your taste runs spiritual and acoustic, and if you want Fes at its most cultured. Buy tickets for the marquee evening concerts in advance, and let the free medina Sufi nights be your serendipity. Pair it with my two-day Fes plan for the perfect rhythm.