Ten days in Morocco: four medinas, one railway line

Land, get to the riad, and spend the afternoon fixing two landmarks in your head. The Koutoubia minaret is visible from most of the city and is the thing you navigate by; the mosque under it is a working one and closed to non-Muslims, so this is a walk through the gardens rather than a visit.

Then east into Djemaa El-Fna, and stay for the change. Through the afternoon the square is orange juice carts, henna and snake charmers; from about six the food stalls are wheeled in, the gas lamps come on and the drum circles start, and the crowd shifts from visitors to Marrakchis. It is loud, slightly absurd and completely unfaked.

Eat on the square if you like the idea of a numbered stall and a bench, or above it on a terrace if you would rather watch. Either way, an early night: tomorrow starts in a garden across town.

Start out in Gueliz, the new town the French laid out in the 1910s, and be at the Majorelle garden when it opens. It is small, cactus-heavy and painted throughout in the cobalt blue the painter Jacques Majorelle mixed for it in the 1920s; Yves Saint Laurent bought and restored it in 1980. Book a timed ticket before you travel, because it sells out and it is miserable at midday.

Taxi back into the medina for the Ben Youssef Madrasa, a sixteenth century Quranic college around a marble courtyard, carved cedar and zellij on every surface, and more than a hundred student cells upstairs. It is the single most beautiful interior in the city and it is best before noon.

Give the afternoon to the souks, which run south from the madrasa back towards the square in a district sorted loosely by trade: dyers, slipper makers, lantern shops, leather. Prices open high and are meant to be negotiated. Getting lost is fine; every lane eventually drains to Djemaa El-Fna.

The southern medina is where the dynasties built, and three sites within a ten minute walk of each other tell the story of what each one did to the last. Start at Bahia Palace at opening time, before the coach groups: a grand vizier's house from the end of the nineteenth century, almost unfurnished, with painted cedar ceilings that are the entire reason to go.

El Badi is ten minutes on and completely different. Ahmad al-Mansur built it in the late sixteenth century out of Italian marble and Sudanese gold, and within a century of his death it had been stripped bare to furnish a new capital at Meknes. What is left is a huge rectangle of red wall, sunken orange gardens, underground passages and a colony of storks.

Finish at the Saadian Tombs, which survived precisely because they were walled up and forgotten for two centuries. The main chamber, carved plaster and cedar around twelve marble columns, is the one intact Saadian interior in Marrakech, and there is usually a queue to see it because only a few people fit at the door.

Take a morning train from Marrakech. It is about four hours across the plain to Rabat Ville, which puts you in the capital in time for lunch, and the station is a ten minute walk from the medina.

Rabat is a shock after Marrakech, in a good way: a calm, green, official city where nobody follows you down the street. Walk through the small medina to the Kasbah of the Oudaias, the twelfth century fortress on the headland above the river mouth. Inside the gate it is a village of narrow lanes painted white above and blue below, with an Andalusian garden at the far end and a platform looking straight out at the Atlantic.

Have mint tea at the cafe on the kasbah terrace above the water, then walk back along the river for the Hassan Tower at the other end of town, where an unfinished twelfth century minaret stands over a field of broken columns. The mausoleum of Mohammed V beneath it, opened in 1967 to a Vietnamese architect's design, is open to visitors and guarded by men on horseback.

A short morning in Rabat, then the train east. Rabat to Fez is a two and a half hour run through farmland and cork oak, arriving at a station in the ville nouvelle a short taxi ride from the medina gates. Somebody from the riad will meet you at the gate, because no vehicle gets any further.

Start gently. The Jnan Sbil garden lies just outside the walls between the old medina and Fes el-Jdid, eighteenth century, full of enormous trees and water channels, and it is a better first hour than plunging straight downhill into the souks.

Then up to Bab Boujloud, the blue-and-green tiled gate that is the medina's front door, and a hundred metres down the main lane to the Bou Inania Madrasa. Built in the 1350s, it is the finest thing in Fez that a non-Muslim can walk into: white marble, carved cedar, a canal running through the courtyard. Eat on a terrace above the gate afterwards and get an early night.

One day, one direction. Talaa Kbira runs downhill from Bab Boujloud into the middle of the medina, and everything today is strung along it. Start at eight or nine, because by ten the lane carries the whole city and there are donkeys in it.

Al Attarine Madrasa sits at the entrance to the spice souk it is named after, smaller than Bou Inania and if anything more finely worked, built by the Marinids in the 1320s. Climb to its roof terrace for the view across to the green pyramid roofs of the Qarawiyyin, which is the next stop and which you cannot go inside: it is a working mosque as well as a university. Walk its perimeter instead and look in at each of the doors.

The afternoon is the tanneries. Go into a leather shop on the north side of the Chouara pits and up to the balcony, where you get the whole grid of stone vats, the men standing waist-deep in them, and a smell that arrives before you do. Someone hands you a sprig of mint at the door; take it.

Take a taxi up to the Merenid Tombs first thing, before the haze. The tombs themselves are fourteenth century ruins on an open hillside and not much to look at; the view is everything, the whole medina spread below in one piece, minarets pushing out of a solid field of flat roofs with olive hills behind.

Back down to the Nejjarine Museum, in a restored fondouk on the little square of the carpenters. The collection is Moroccan woodwork, chests, doors, instruments, musical and otherwise, and the building is as good as anything in it. The rooftop cafe is the quietest seat in Fes el-Bali.

In the afternoon walk or taxi west into Fes el-Jdid, the Marinid extension of the 1270s, and through the Mellah. The old Jewish quarter is easy to recognise: the houses have wooden balconies facing the street rather than inward courtyards. The Ibn Danan synagogue, seventeenth century and restored, is opened by a caretaker who will show you the mikveh under the floor.

The longest leg of the trip: about five hours from Fez to Tanger-Ville, northwest across the Rif foothills and down to the coast. There are only a few direct departures, so take a morning one and eat on the train.

Tangier is a different country again. It faces Spain, it speaks Spanish before French, and its old town is a small steep triangle above the port rather than a labyrinth. Walk in through the Grand Socco, officially Place du 9 Avril 1947, named for the day Sultan Mohammed V stood there and asked publicly for independence.

Then out west along the cliff to Marshan for Cafe Hafa, which is nothing but whitewashed terraces stepped down the rock with plastic chairs on them, open since 1921, facing the Strait. Mint tea, freighters queueing for the narrows, and the sun going down behind the headland. It is the best hour of the trip and it costs about a euro.

Climb to the top of the old town first. The kasbah is the walled citadel at the summit, and the sultan's palace inside it, the Dar el-Makhzen, is now the city museum: Roman mosaics carried up from Volubilis, Phoenician glass, painted ceilings, and a courtyard garden that is worth the ticket by itself. From the terrace behind it the Spanish coast is close enough to pick out buildings on a clear morning.

Walk down through the lanes to the American Legation. The Sultan gave the building to the United States in 1821 and it stayed the American mission until 1956, which makes it the only United States national landmark outside the country. Inside it is a museum of the international years, with a wing devoted to Paul Bowles, and it is one of the most likeable small museums anywhere.

Spend what is left of the afternoon on the Petit Socco, the little square that was the disreputable centre of the international city, hotels and bank offices and every passing writer of the 1950s. It is quiet now. Order a coffee, sit outside, and watch the medina go by until it is time to eat fish somewhere near the port.

One last morning on the coast. A taxi runs west out of the city through the pine woods to Cape Spartel, the headland where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are said to meet, with a nineteenth century lighthouse on the point and a great deal of wind.

A few kilometres south of the cape are the Caves of Hercules, half natural sea cave and half quarried by millstone cutters over centuries. Everyone comes for the sea opening at the far end, worn by the water into a shape that looks uncannily like a map of Africa. Low tide is better, when the sea is not coming in through it.

Back in town by lunchtime with time to spare. Tanger-Ville puts you on the high-speed line to Casablanca in a little over two hours if you are flying home from there, and Ibn Battouta airport is twenty minutes from the station.