What's it like to drink mint tea on a riad rooftop at sunset?

After a day of being battered by the medina — the crowds, the colours, the constant gentle haggling — you climb the riad's tiled stairs, push through a little door, and step out onto the roof, and the whole pace of the day changes in a single breath. Up here the lanes' chaos drops away beneath you, the air moves, and the city unfolds in every direction as a soft sea of flat terracotta roofs and green-tiled minarets, with the mountains or the desert haze smudged along the far edge.

The tea comes, and it's a small ceremony in itself. A silver pot, a bundle of fresh mint stuffed in among gunpowder green tea and a frankly heroic amount of sugar, poured from a height into a slim engraved glass so it froths at the top. You wrap your fingers around the hot glass, breathe in the sweet green steam, and take the first scalding, syrupy sip — and the sugar and mint and heat hit all at once and something in your shoulders finally lets go.

Then the light starts its slow show. The sun drops toward the rooftops and everything turns to warm honey, then rose, then a deep dusty gold, the white walls flushing pink, long shadows reaching across the terraces. Swifts come out in their dozens, screaming and slicing through the warm air just above your head. And as the colour deepens, the first muezzin begins, and then another, and another, until the call to prayer is rolling across the entire city at once from every minaret, a layered, echoing tide of sound that gives you goosebumps every single time.

What makes it perfect is that it asks nothing of you. There's no sight to tick off, no maze to navigate, no one to bargain with — just a glass of tea, a fading sky, the birds, and the call drifting up from below as the day's heat finally breaks. Travellers plan elaborate itineraries and then tell you afterwards that this, the unremarkable hour with a teapot on a rooftop while the light went, was somehow the part of Morocco they miss most.