Three days in Meknes: an imperial capital that lets you look around in peace

Two nights in Moulay Ismail's city, with a full day out at the Roman ruins of Volubilis and the holy town of Moulay Idriss

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Meknes
Places
9 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Meknes has everything the famous Moroccan cities have and about a tenth of the pressure. There is a walled medina, a sultan's tomb, a monumental gate, a covered souk and a museum in a nineteenth-century palace, and you can walk through all of it without being adopted by a guide you did not ask for. Nobody will steer you towards a carpet shop. Prices are quoted once and they are lower than in Fez, which is forty minutes away by train.

The reason the city is grand at all is one man. Moulay Ismail took the throne in 1672, ruled for fifty five years, and decided that Meknes rather than Fez or Marrakech would be his capital. What he built was less a palace than a walled district the size of a town, with granaries, stables, reservoirs, barracks and gardens inside kilometres of rammed-earth wall. He was a contemporary of Louis XIV and the comparison was one he made himself. After he died the court drifted away, an earthquake did the rest, and what is left is a half-ruined imperial city with grass growing between the walls.

The other half of a visit is twenty kilometres north. Volubilis was a Roman town out on the imperial frontier, and its mosaics are still lying in the houses they were laid in, uncovered, under the open sky. The hill town of Moulay Idriss sits in sight of it, built around the tomb of the man who brought Islam to Morocco. Two nights covers the city and a full day out to both.

Highlights

  • Bab Mansour, the great tiled gate the sultan's son finished for him, best looked at from a cafe on the square
  • The mausoleum of Moulay Ismail, one of the few Moroccan shrines a non-Muslim may walk into
  • Heri es-Souani, granaries built on the scale of a cathedral, with a reservoir beside them
  • Volubilis, where the mosaics are still in the floors of the houses rather than behind glass in a museum
  • Moulay Idriss, a green-roofed shrine town spilling down two hills
  • A medina you can get lost in without anyone offering to rescue you

Where to stay

Meknes

The city divides into three pieces and they line up neatly. The medina is in the north, small, walled and easy to cross in fifteen minutes. South of it, through the great gate, is the imperial city: an enormous walled enclosure of ruined palace, tomb, prison, granaries and reservoir, mostly empty and mostly free to walk through. East across the bridge is Hamrya, the French-built new town, where the hotels with lifts and the restaurants with wine lists are.

The imperial city is the thing people underestimate. It is not a monument, it is a district, and Moulay Ismail's walls run for kilometres through what are now ordinary streets and olive groves. Half of it has fallen down and nothing has been rebuilt into a theme park, so you get the odd experience of walking through a ruined seventeenth-century capital with almost nobody else in it.

Volubilis and Moulay Idriss, twenty kilometres north, are properly part of a visit here rather than an optional extra: they are the reason to give the city two nights instead of a stopover between Fez and Rabat.

Day by day

Day 1 in Meknes

Bab Mansour, the medersa roof and the palace museum

Arrive, drop the bags, and give the afternoon to the medina, which is small enough to do properly in half a day.

Start at the square in front of Bab Mansour, because you cannot really miss it and you should not try. It is the biggest of the city's twenty-odd gates, finished by his son a few years after Moulay Ismail died, and it is a piece of showing off rather than a piece of defence: green and blue tiles across the whole face, and marble columns at the flanks said to have been carried up from the Roman ruins you will see tomorrow. Sit at one of the cafes on the square with a mint tea and look at it for twenty minutes. That is what the square is for.

The Medersa Bou Inania is a few streets into the medina, a fourteenth-century Qur'anic school built around a courtyard of carved cedar and stucco and coloured tile, with student cells the size of a cupboard on the upper floor. Go up to the roof. From there you are level with the green tiles of the Great Mosque next door, which you cannot go into, and looking across the whole medina.

Finish at Dar Jamai, a vizier's palace on the main square with a walled Andalusian garden and a collection of Moroccan woodwork, ceramics and jewellery inside. The building is the exhibit as much as anything in it.

  1. 15:30

    Bab Mansour

    Historic

    Look at it from the square rather than planning to go inside; the restoration has dragged on for years. Late afternoon light hits the tilework straight on.

  2. 16:45

    Medersa Bou Inania

    Other

    Small, cheap and the best twenty minutes in the medina. Every floor is open, including the roof terrace over the courtyard.

  3. 18:00

    Dar Jamai Museum

    Historic

    A nineteenth-century palace turned museum of Moroccan arts, with the garden as good as the galleries. Confirm it is open before making the walk.

  4. 20:00

    Dinner in the medina

    Eat

    Pastilla if it is on, tagine if it is not. The restaurants around the main square do both well and charge medina prices rather than Marrakech ones.

With more time: The covered souk runs north from the square and is a working market rather than a tourist one, heaviest on metalwork, olives and preserved lemons. It shuts around dusk and is at its best in the hour before that.

Day 2 in Meknes

The mosaics at Volubilis and the holy town on the hill

A full day out, twenty kilometres north, and worth starting early because Volubilis has no shade to speak of and the middle of the day on that plateau is punishing.

Volubilis was a Roman city on the far southwestern edge of the empire, and before that a seat of the Berber kings of Mauretania, and it went on being lived in for centuries after Rome let go of it. Much of its cut stone ended up in Moulay Ismail's building sites down the road. What survives is the street plan, a triumphal arch, the columns of the basilica, and the reason everybody comes: mosaic floors, dozens of them, lying open in the houses they belong to. No ropes, no glass, no roof.

Two houses to make sure of. The House of Orpheus, at the southern end, has Orpheus playing to a circle of animals in what was the dining room, with a dolphin in a side room for luck and a sea goddess in a chariot in the entrance hall. The House of Venus, over on the eastern side under a cypress, has the better set: chariots in a hippodrome pulled by teams of peacocks and geese, and Diana caught bathing by a hunter who is sprouting antlers as you watch. The Venus the house is named for was lifted and taken to Tangier, which is the way of these things.

In the afternoon, Moulay Idriss, five kilometres away and visible from the ruins, draped over two hills around a shrine with a pyramid of green tiles on it. Moulay Idris I was a descendant of the Prophet who arrived here in the 780s, founded the first Muslim dynasty in Morocco and is buried in the middle of the town. The shrine is closed to non-Muslims, and the town, where non-Muslims were not allowed to stay the night until the mid 2000s, is now entirely relaxed about visitors. Climb up through the lanes to one of the terraces for the view down onto the green roof, and look for the round minaret on the way, which is said to be the only cylindrical one in the country.

  1. 09:30

    The House of Orpheus

    Visit

    The southern end of the site, so start here and work north with the sun behind you. The mosaic is best read from the doorway of the dining room.

  2. 11:00

    House of Venus

    Visit

    The richest floors on the site, seven corridors and eight rooms of them. Take a hat: there is no shade anywhere in Volubilis.

  3. 12:45

    Lunch below the ruins

    Eat

    There are a couple of simple places at the site entrance and better ones in Moulay Idriss. Either way, eat before the climb rather than after it.

  4. 14:30

    Sentissi Mosque

    Religious

    The round minaret, put up in 1939 by a man who had come back from the hajj, now a Qur'anic school. A short steep walk up from the main square.

With more time: If you have a driver rather than a taxi, the terraces above the town are worth the extra half hour at the end of the day, when the sun goes off the plain and the whole valley including Volubilis turns gold.

Day 3 in Meknes

The sultan's tomb, the underground prison and the granaries

One long walk south through the imperial city before the train, all of it inside Moulay Ismail's walls and all of it within about two kilometres.

The mausoleum first. Moulay Ismail was buried here in 1727 in a complex begun in his own lifetime and enlarged repeatedly since, and it is one of the very few Islamic religious buildings in Morocco that a non-Muslim may enter at all. You go through a series of quiet tiled courtyards to a doorway, and look into the tomb chamber from there. It takes half an hour and it is the calmest place in the city.

Prison Kara, a few minutes away, is a vast pillared hall dug under the ground, traditionally said to have held Christian captives working on the sultan's building sites. Be warned that the entrance charge buys you exactly what the name suggests: empty vaults, cool and echoing and completely bare. Some people find it the eeriest thing in Meknes and others find it a dark room.

Then out to Heri es-Souani, which is the one nobody expects. These are the granaries and stables, built to keep a capital and its cavalry fed through a siege, and the surviving vaults run away from you in the half dark like a cathedral crypt with the roof off. Beside it lies the Agdal basin, an enormous reservoir dug to water the gardens, now a flat sheet of water with a path round it and storks nesting on the walls behind. Sit there for a while before the taxi back to the station.

  1. 09:00

    Mausoleum of Moulay Ismail

    Historic

    Shoulders and knees covered, shoes off at the threshold. Generally shut around Friday prayers, so plan a Friday morning around it.

  2. 10:15

    Prison Kara

    Historic

    Underground, unlit in places and genuinely bare. Worth it if vast empty spaces appeal, skippable if they do not, and a torch helps.

  3. 11:30

    Heri es-Souani

    Other

    Twenty minutes on foot from the tomb along the palace wall, or a couple of dirham in a petit taxi. Allow an hour with the basin next door.

With more time: The royal golf course south of the granaries was laid out in the old palace gardens and the walk along its wall is a pleasant twenty minutes if the train is not for a while.

Before you go

Getting in

Trains are the way in. Meknes sits on the Fez to Rabat line, the country's main railway: Fez is forty minutes and costs about as much as a sandwich, Rabat a bit over two hours, Casablanca a bit over three, Tangier three and a half to four and a half depending on whether you change at Kenitra. Marrakech is six and a half hours and best done overnight or not at all.

There are two stations. Meknes-Amir Abdelkader is the small one and it is the one you want, five minutes from the ville nouvelle and a short taxi from the medina. Meknes-Ville is bigger and further east. Both are served by the same trains, so ask for Amir Abdelkader when you buy the ticket.

The CTM coach station is next to the main railway station and buses run from almost everywhere, including Chefchaouen in about five and a half hours, which is the one route the trains cannot help with. Grand taxis, shared six to a car, leave for Fez and for Moulay Idriss whenever they fill up.

Where to stay

The medina, in a riad, if you want the atmosphere and a roof terrace over the rooftops. The ville nouvelle, called Hamrya, if you want a normal hotel, restaurants that serve alcohol and somewhere to walk in the evening. The two are ten minutes apart across a bridge over a dry river.

Meknes is cheap by Moroccan standards and a good riad here costs what a plain hotel room does in Marrakech, which is the single strongest practical argument for coming.

Getting around

On foot for the medina and the imperial city, which adjoin each other and are the whole of a visit. The walk from Bab Mansour out to the granaries is a couple of kilometres along the palace walls and is one of the nicer walks in urban Morocco.

Petit taxis are small blue cars, metered, and the minimum fare is a few dirham. After eight in the evening there is a surcharge of about half again, which is normal and not a scam. Insist on the meter.

For Volubilis and Moulay Idriss, either take a grand taxi from the rank and agree the price for the round trip with waiting time, or hire a driver for the day through your riad. Working out the local bus for this is possible and not worth the hours it costs.

What is open, and what is not

Meknes has been under restoration for years and it is uneven. Bab Mansour has been behind scaffolding since before 2023 and the work has run well past its deadline, so you may only be able to admire the gate from the square. Lahdim Square itself was dug up through 2024. Dar Jamai has been closed for renovation and reopened before.

None of this ruins a visit, because the imperial city, the granaries and Volubilis are all open ground and unaffected. But check on the day rather than turning up at a hoarding, and treat any single closure as a reason to walk further rather than a reason to be disappointed.

Dress and mosques

As almost everywhere in Morocco, working mosques are closed to non-Muslims. The mausoleum of Moulay Ismail is the rare exception and even there the tomb chamber is viewed from the doorway rather than entered. Cover shoulders and knees, take shoes off where you are asked to, and expect it to be shut around Friday prayers.

Moulay Idriss deserves particular care. The shrine at the middle of the town is a functioning place of pilgrimage and non-Muslims may not go in. The rest of the town is entirely welcoming, and the polite thing is to walk around the sanctuary rather than test the line.

Food

Meknes cooks the standard Moroccan repertoire well and quietly. The dish worth ordering here is pastilla, the pigeon or chicken pie in layers of warqa pastry with almonds and cinnamon and icing sugar on top, which sounds wrong and is not.

Everything else runs on tagine, harira soup thick with lentils and chickpeas, and maaqouda potato fritters from a stall. The area around the main square is where the snack places are, and eating in the medina costs a fraction of what the same plate costs in Marrakech.

This is also wine country. Most Moroccan wine is grown in the hills around Meknes, which is not something the medina advertises but the restaurants in the new town do.

Meknes is the imperial city people skip, usually because Fez is forty minutes away and louder about itself. What that gets you is a medina without a single person following you, a ruined seventeenth-century capital you can wander through nearly alone, and rooms at half the price.

Add the Roman mosaics up the road and the green-tiled shrine town above them, and two nights here is the least stressful stretch of a Moroccan trip and one of the more memorable.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Meknes worth staying in, or is it a day trip from Fez?
Stay. A day trip gets you the gate and the tomb and misses Volubilis, which needs a morning of its own, and it misses the point of the place, which is being somewhere calm after Fez rather than seeing one more medina.
How many days do you need in Meknes?
Two nights. The medina and the imperial city are half a day each and the day out to Volubilis and Moulay Idriss fills the middle. A third night only makes sense if you want to slow down rather than see more.
Can you visit Volubilis and Moulay Idriss without a car?
Yes. Grand taxis leave Meknes for Moulay Idriss regularly, and from there it is a short hop to the ruins. The simpler version is to hire a grand taxi for the round trip with waiting time, agreed before you set off, which costs less than most people expect.
When is the best time to go?
Spring and autumn. Volubilis is an open plateau with no shade at all, so July and August afternoons there are genuinely unpleasant, and winter can be cold and wet enough to make the imperial city a muddy walk.
Is Meknes safe and easy for a first trip to Morocco?
It is one of the easiest places in the country. There is very little of the faux guide and hard sell culture that wears people down in Fez and Marrakech, the medina is small enough not to get properly lost in, and prices are quoted honestly more often than not.
Can you change the plan?
Copy it into the planner and move things about: the medina day and the imperial city day swap without consequence, and the Volubilis day works just as well at the start if the weather says so.