Eleven days from Malaga to Fez: through a Spanish city in Africa

The airport is twelve minutes from the centre by train, so drop bags and go straight to the hill. The Roman theatre sits at the bottom of it, built under Augustus, buried for centuries and only rediscovered in 1951 when a cultural centre was being built on top of it. The building came down; the theatre stayed. You can see the whole thing free from the street.

Directly behind it the Alcazaba climbs the slope: an eleventh century Moorish palace-fortress in two walled rings, with gardens, fountains and a zigzag of gates designed to make an attacking army turn corners. Roman columns are reused in its arches, taken from the theatre below. Go up slowly, in the last of the afternoon.

Come down for the cathedral, which the city calls La Manquita, the one-armed lady, because the south tower was never finished. The money for it went, according to the story the city likes, to the American revolution. The interior is enormous and the choir stalls are the thing to look at.

Then eat late in the streets between the cathedral and the market.

Start in the Atarazanas market, which is the best hour of the Malaga day and over by two. The building is nineteenth century iron and glass wrapped around a fourteenth century Nasrid gateway, the arch through which ships once entered the shipyard when the sea came this far inland. Inside it is fish, ham, olives and a row of bars where people are drinking vermouth at ten in the morning.

Then the Picasso Museum. He was born in this city in 1881 and left it at ten, and the museum is his family's gift back to it: two hundred works in a sixteenth century palace, weighted towards the things he kept rather than the things he sold, so it is a quieter and more personal collection than the big holdings in Paris and Barcelona. Under the courtyard are Phoenician and Roman remains found during the conversion.

In the afternoon go up to the Castillo de Gibralfaro, either by the walled ramp from the Alcazaba or on the number 35 bus. It is a fourteenth century Nasrid fort on the top of the hill, and the walk around its ramparts gives you the port, the bullring, the cathedral and the whole coast at once. Go late; the light is better and so is the temperature.

The boat to Melilla goes tonight or tomorrow, depending on the sailing you booked.

The crossing takes most of a day or most of a night, depending on the boat. Coming in by sea you get the whole shape of the place at once: a low headland with a walled town on it, a modern grid behind, and the brown hills of the Rif rising immediately beyond the fence.

Drop bags and walk the seafront. The promenade runs from the port around to the beaches and gives you the fortress from the water side, which is the angle it was built to be seen from.

Then into the Plaza de Espana, which is where the old town and the new one meet: a circular square with the Palace of the Assembly on one side, palm trees, and the entrance to the ensanche running north from it. Sit outside somewhere for an hour and adjust. Melilla is a small city with a slow evening, everybody is out at eight, and it feels less like Spain-in-Africa than like a provincial Spanish capital that happens to have a mosque in the middle of it.

Eat Spanish, cheaply. It is the last chance for a while.

The whole of today is in the old town, which locals just call El Pueblo. It is a walled Renaissance fortress on the headland, built in four successive enclosures from the sixteenth century onwards, and it is still lived in: washing lines, cats, a couple of bars, and about a thousand residents inside the walls.

Go in through the Puerta de Santiago, a ravelin from 1549 with a drawbridge over a dry moat and a chapel inside it that is the only Gothic building in Africa. The tunnels and cisterns underneath were cut to keep the garrison alive through sieges, and the guided route through them is worth the small ticket.

The Melilla Museum, in the old clock tower at the top, does the city's military history, which here is the city's whole history: five hundred years of holding a headland against whoever was outside the walls, and a July morning in 1936 when the officers of the garrison started a coup that turned into a civil war.

Come out onto the ramparts at the end of the afternoon and look east. That is Morocco, and you are walking into it in two days.

Enrique Nieto arrived in Melilla in 1909, straight out of Barcelona and Gaudi's studio, and never left. He became the city architect and designed several hundred buildings in a city that was expanding fast because of the mines and the garrison, which is how a small African town ended up with the largest body of modernista architecture in Spain outside Catalonia.

The best of it is on and around Calle Lopez Moreno and the Avenida del Rey Juan Carlos, and it is a walk rather than a visit: floral ironwork, tiled facades, curved balconies, stained glass over doorways, a whole city block at a time. Look up constantly. Very little of it is signposted and nobody else is doing this.

The Or Zoruah synagogue is Nieto's, from 1924, and is the one interior to get inside: arabesque plasterwork and a gallery, above a shop, in an ordinary street. Opening is by arrangement rather than by timetable, so ask at the tourist office the day before.

The Melul house, on the corner of the Avenida, is generally called his finest work. It is a private building and the outside is the whole visit, which takes ten minutes and is worth crossing the city for.

Start early. A taxi or the city bus gets you to the Beni Ansar crossing in fifteen minutes, and then you walk: out of Spain, a few hundred metres of no man's land, into Morocco, a form, a stamp. It can be quick and it can be slow. Shared taxis to Nador wait on the far side.

The train from Nador leaves in the morning and takes about five hours, running south over the hills and joining the main line at Taourirt. It is a beautiful, empty, unhurried ride through country nobody writes about. Change at Fez and take the forty minute hop west to Meknes, arriving mid afternoon.

Then go and look at the gate. Bab Mansour, finished in 1732, is the ceremonial entrance to the imperial city and the largest and most decorated gate in Morocco: green and white zellij across the whole face, marble columns taken from Volubilis holding up the flanking bastions, and an inscription boasting about it. It is lit at night and that is when to see it.

Behind it, the mausoleum of Moulay Ismail is one of the few working shrines in Morocco open to non-Muslims, out of respect for the sultan who is generally reckoned to have been the most brutal ruler in Moroccan history. And past that, the Heri es-Souani, his granaries and stables: vaults the size of a cathedral nave, built to hold enough grain to survive a twenty year siege, with a water system underneath.

Take a grand taxi north for half an hour. Volubilis was the westernmost city of any size in Roman Africa, perhaps twenty thousand people growing olives and exporting oil, abandoned to earthquake and stone robbing and then left alone for a thousand years, which is why so much of it survives.

What makes it exceptional is the mosaics. They are still on the floors of the houses they were laid in, uncovered and open to the sky, so you walk down the main street and look into a dining room with Orpheus playing to the animals in it, and another with Venus, and another with a labour of Hercules. There is a basilica, a triumphal arch, an olive press and the Rif behind the whole thing. Go early or late; there is almost no shade.

On the way back, stop at Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, the white town stacked on two hills three kilometres away. Moulay Idriss I, the great-grandson of the Prophet's grandson, fled here from Baghdad in 786, founded the first Moroccan dynasty and is buried in the zawiya at the centre. It is the holiest town in the country and non-Muslims were not allowed to stay overnight in it until 2005. The shrine is closed to visitors; the view down onto its green roofs from the terrace above is not.

Back in Meknes, walk the medina in the evening. It is small, it sells things to Moroccans rather than to tourists, and nobody will follow you.

Forty minutes on the train and you are in Fez by late morning. Get a taxi to Bab Boujloud, the blue gate at the western edge of the medina, and start gently. Jnan Sbil is directly outside it: the oldest garden in the city, laid out by a sultan in the eighteenth century, restored and reopened in 2011, with a lake, a water wheel and enough shade to sit under for an hour while the city goes past the railings.

Then in through the gate to the Bou Inania madrasa, which is fifty metres inside it. Built in the 1350s, it is the only madrasa in Fez that also functioned as a full congregational mosque, which is why non-Muslims can go in and see the whole thing: carved cedar, cut plaster, zellij to shoulder height and a courtyard that is the best single room in Morocco.

In the late afternoon take a taxi up to the Merenid tombs on the hill north of the medina. The tombs themselves are ruined fourteenth century shells and nobody visits for them. What you go for is the view: the entire medina laid out below in one bowl, the green roofs of the Qaraouiyine in the middle, and the call to prayer starting at one minaret and spreading across the whole city.

Come down for dinner and stay near the gate. Tomorrow is the deep one.

Today is one long walk downhill through the medina, and it is worth taking a guide for the first half of it. Not because you will get lost permanently, but because a good one gets you into workshops you would never find a door to, and the alternative is being adopted by a bad one at the gate.

The Qaraouiyine is the centre of it all. Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a merchant from Kairouan, founded it in 859 as a mosque and school, and it has been teaching without a break ever since, which makes it the oldest continuously operating university in the world. The mosque is closed to non-Muslims, but you can look through several doorways into the courtyard, and the library beside it, restored and reopened in 2016, holds manuscripts from the ninth century.

Two minutes away is the Attarine madrasa, built in the 1320s next to the spice market. It is smaller than Bou Inania and even more densely decorated: every surface carved, cut, tiled or written on, and a small courtyard with a pool that makes the whole thing feel like a jewellery box.

Then the tanneries, downhill and unmistakable by smell. The Chouara pits have been in use since the medieval period and are worked exactly as they were: hides in lime and pigeon droppings to strip the hair, then into the coloured dye pits. You watch from the balcony of a leather shop, they hand you a sprig of mint at the door, and you are expected to look at the bags afterwards. Do; the prices are the best in the country.

Today is the other half of the city. Fes el-Jdid, the new town, was laid out in the thirteenth century, which tells you something about the age of the old one, and the Mellah inside it was the Jewish quarter from the fifteenth century onwards. The word itself started here.

The Ibn Danan synagogue is a seventeenth century room with a wooden ark, a tiled floor and a mikveh in the basement, restored in the 1990s and kept open by a caretaker who will show you the roof. The cemetery below it is white, enormous and startling: thousands of whitewashed tombs on a slope, laid out in rows, with the city behind. There is no congregation left to speak of and the buildings are maintained anyway.

Walk back up to Dar Batha, a palace built for the sultan Hassan I at the end of the nineteenth century and now the museum of Fassi crafts: the blue ceramics the city is known for, carved wood from the madrasas, Berber carpets, and an Andalusian garden with an enormous oak in it.

Finish at the Glaoui palace, which is nothing like the others. It belonged to the pasha of Marrakech, it has been left to decay since the 1950s, and a member of the family shows people round the crumbling salons for a few dirhams. Painted ceilings falling in, a harem wing full of dust, and a working studio in one corner. It is the strangest and most memorable hour in Fez.

Go back into the medina for an hour before you leave, and go to the shrine at its centre. The zawiya of Moulay Idriss II holds the tomb of the man who made Fez a city in 808, and it is the spiritual heart of the whole place: the lanes around it are a sanctuary, marked by wooden bars across the street that once stopped animals and non-Muslims going further.

You cannot go in. What you can do is stand at the open doorway on the north side, where Fassis are constantly arriving to touch the brass ring, and look into the chamber. It takes ten minutes and it is the most alive thing in the medina.

Then buy pastries somewhere on the way out, and go. Fez has an airport twenty minutes from the centre with European routes, or the train runs west to Rabat in three hours and Casablanca in four if the trip continues.

The medina is easiest to leave at Bab Boujloud, where the taxis are.