What can you do in Fes beyond the medina?

It's true that the medina is why you come to Fes, and you could spend three days inside its walls and not exhaust it. But people are often surprised there's a real city beyond — and some of it is worth your time. Start just outside the walls: the Marinid Tombs hill at dusk for the great panorama, and the Borj Nord fortress nearby, which houses an arms museum and gives another sweeping view over the whole medina bowl. These hill viewpoints reframe the city entirely and cost little or nothing.

Then there's the Ville Nouvelle, the French-colonial new town, which most tourists ignore completely. It's where modern Fassi life happens — wide boulevards, pavement cafés, some lovely Art Deco facades, proper shops and restaurants, and a relaxed, hassle-free atmosphere that's a genuine relief after the medina intensity. The Jardin Jnan Sbil, a restored historic garden between the old and new towns, is a beautiful, shaded, free place to decompress for an hour among ponds, palms and bamboo — I send overwhelmed first-timers here to catch their breath.

The best 'beyond Fes' moves, though, are day trips. Volubilis, the remarkably complete Roman city with its mosaics and arch, sits about an hour away and pairs perfectly with the holy hilltop town of Moulay Idriss and the handsome imperial city of Meknes — that trio makes one of the most rewarding days in northern Morocco. If you'd rather have nature, the Middle Atlas is right on the doorstep: the curiously Alpine town of Ifrane and the cedar forests around Azrou, where troops of Barbary macaques live wild, are a cool, green, completely different Morocco an hour and a half away.

My honest advice on structuring it: give the medina the priority it deserves — two full days at least — but if you have a third or fourth day in Fes, don't just do more medina; use it to get outside. A morning at the Marinid viewpoint and Jnan Sbil, an afternoon in the Ville Nouvelle, and a full day out to Volubilis–Meknes or the Atlas cedars gives your Fes stay real range and stops the medina from becoming a beautiful blur. The contrast is what makes the city stick in your memory.