What is it like to walk the blue streets of Chefchaouen?

The blue does something to you that's hard to explain until you're in it. You walk up from the main square into the old medina and within a few steps you're surrounded — not just blue doors, but blue walls, blue steps, blue plant pots, blue alleyways disappearing uphill, every shade from pale powder to deep cobalt, all of it lime-washed and slightly uneven and glowing in the mountain light. The effect is weirdly soothing, almost underwater. Your shoulders drop. People speak more quietly here than in Fes or Marrakech, as if the colour itself asks for calm.

It's a small, steep, walkable place, and wandering is the entire point — there's no big monument to tick off, you just climb and turn and let the lanes lead you. The textures are lovely: tumbling pink and red geraniums spilling against the blue, cats dozing on blue steps, hand-painted doors, the occasional old woman in a striped Rif blanket and a pointed straw hat. There are cute corners every few metres engineered, frankly, for photographs — the famous flower-pot staircase, the doorways framed just so — and you'll find yourself stopping constantly. The Rif mountains rise green behind the rooftops, and there's a cool freshness to the air that the lowland cities lack.

Honesty time, because expectations matter. Chefchaouen is no longer a hidden secret — it's firmly on the Instagram trail, and the most photogenic spots get genuinely crowded with people queuing to photograph the same staircase by mid-morning, especially in high season. There's hassle too: kids who'll 'show you' a viewpoint for a tip, vendors of the same blue trinkets. And not every wall is hand-painted artistry; some of the blue is touched up precisely because it pulls tourists. None of this ruins it — it's still beautiful — but go in expecting a popular pretty town rather than an undiscovered village and you won't be disappointed.

The fix for the crowds is timing, and it's a good one. Get out into the lanes early — just after sunrise the blue is soft and the streets are nearly empty and it feels magical and yours, cats and shopkeepers opening up and almost no one else. Stay overnight rather than day-tripping (most crowds are bussed in and out) so you get that quiet dawn and the calm evening when the day-trippers have gone. Climb to the Spanish Mosque on the hill at sunset for the view back over the whole blue town glowing under the Rif. Do it that way and Chefchaouen is one of the gentlest, most photogenic, most simply pleasant places in Morocco.