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You are unlikely to forget the Fez medina – if you ever get out, that is. With its supposed 10,000 alleys (it would surely take a lifetime to count them), none much wider than a donkey cart, the old town of the most ancient of the Moroccan imperial capitals might have been built deliberately as a maze. It draws you in; I had intended to stay two days in the city but ended up spending six.

Entering through Bab Boujeloud, Bab Jamaï or one of the other gigantic gates set at irregular intervals into the city walls, you set off on a temporal as well as a spatial journey, because day-to-day life in the medina has not changed much over centuries. The crooked pathways are medieval; so is the inhabitants’ uncalibrated sense of time. As a visitor, you could try to plough metaphorical Haussman boulevards through the red-clay walls of Fes el Bali (“Fes the Old” in Arabic), ticking off the stops on your itinerary; you could try, and I would not advise against it in some spirit of hippy mysticism, or because getting lost is “part of the fun” (it can be nerve-wracking in such an unfamiliar place) but just because, as it is certain you will get lost, you might as well resign yourself to it from the beginning.

A good point from which to begin getting lost is the tanneries; nowhere else in the medina is the sense stronger of suddenly being transported back to the middle ages. From the surrounding roof terraces, the many, bathtub-sized stone vats in which the animal hides are dyed resemble an enormous, multicoloured honeycomb, across which the tannery workers crawl like toiling bees. You may want to keep your distance, because the decaying skins and the animal urine used, as it has been for centuries, to cure the leather make for an overwhelmingly noisome atmosphere, against which the sprigs of mint the guides hand you to hold up to your nose are minimal defence. There is no such protection for the tannery-men, who are paid a pittance to pound the hides with their bare feet, up to their waists in the powerful dyes, but who nonetheless form a venerable guild in which jobs are passed down from father to son.

If you have a taste for the Boschean you can slip the foreman 10 dirham and enter the tanneries at ground level – risking fainting from the stench and emerging from a vat newly vermilion or ultramarine – but most people view the scene from one of the terraces as a prelude, they next discover, to being taken downstairs to experience another great Moroccan institution: the craft shop. Travellers have sung the praises of Moroccan leather through the ages, and the products of the Fez tanneries, among the country’s finest, remain compelling purchases. You might particularly wish to walk away with some babouches – ubiquitous, pointed leather slippers, supremely comfortable and excellent lounging wear – or some leather luggage, which, if well stitched, is a bargain; but you should only purchase on a second visit, and it is at this point that a digression is in order on the important subject of guides.

Like most Moroccan cities, Fez is thick with them. They are unavoidable, and the quality of your encounters with them will colour your visit. It is worth hiring an official guide from the Syndicat d’Initiative, in the ville nouvelle (the modern, French-built part of Fez); otherwise one of countless unofficial guides will try to attach himself to you. Guides cannot necessarily help being guides; their multitudinousness is one of the consequences of tying an economy so heavily to tourism, as Morocco’s has been since the 1970s. Still, I cannot help feeling that a particular, picaresque Moroccan type is drawn to a guiding career – think of a sort of louche David Niven – whose wiles will inevitably irk you on location but will probably raise a wry smile from the safe distance of home.

If you do hire a guide, be picky. Engage him (there are no female guides) in conversation first to determine his fluency and enthusiasm; some guides just want to exploit you. Any guide is useful for keeping the other guides at bay, but a good one will orient you and disclose parts of the medina you would never find on your own. Perhaps the height of my tour with the world-weary Saed was the curlicued discourse from one Mr Driss on the curative properties of carnation, mimosa and narcissus essences – some of the “700 perfumes and spices” lining the walls of his apothecary.

Genuine or guileful, most guides will include in your perambulation a visit to a craft shop, such as the leather vendors surrounding the tanneries. They do so, not because of their pride in Fez handicrafts – which can, indeed, be excellent – but to scoop a whopping commission. With the proviso that it is at this point that you begin to get lost, one rule applies whatever you seek in the great market that is the medina: whether buying yards of vibrant fabric from Souk Sabbighin (the dyers’ street, its gullies running red all day as if Sweeney Todd had set up stall there) blue-and-white Fez pots or chunky Berber jewellery, never do so in the presence of a guide. And always haggle.

But if you want to fly home with a carpet – for my money, the pick of the Moroccan craft crop – the Fez dealers are generally too smooth-tongued for you to get a reasonable purchase. Bargaining is easier in the town of Meknes, two hours away by bus or collective grand taxi. A selection of sites to delay you, however, before you depart the medina include the 14th century Bou Inania medersa: with its exquisite carved cedar, tilework and stucco, the finest example in Morocco of the former religious schools that spread throughout the Arab world from the end of the first millennium. On the way there, if coming from Bab Boujeloud, stop just inside the gate at one of the stalls selling the Fez delicacy pastilla: nutty pigeon pie dusted with icing sugar and a criss-cross pattern of cinnamon – distinctive, tasty fuel for a day’s meandering.

The placid streets of the Mellah, the former ghetto in Fes el Djedid (“Fes the New”, i.e. 13th century), are far from the madding crowd around the medersa. The Jewish houses, facing outwards unlike in the rest of the medina, provide welcome shade but virtually obscure the sky. You will need to watch your head, as earlier residents must have done: “mellah” means salt in Arabic, and the name of the quarter possibly refers to the Jews’ old role of salting the heads of criminals before they were spiked on the city gates. In the open ground just beyond one of those ancient gates, Bab Mahrouk, you can join the crowds gathering around storytellers, snakecharmers and musicians as dusk settles on the medina.

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