How Morocco feels

Painters came for it first. Eugène Delacroix crossed to Morocco with a French diplomatic mission in 1832 and filled notebooks with more than a hundred works; Tangier stayed with him for the rest of his life. Henri Matisse spent the winters of 1912 and 1913 there, and called the light mellow and the city a painter's paradise.

It is not the hard white light people expect from Africa. Writers on those painters note how North African daylight seems to soften contrast, as if through a filter. In the afternoon the walls of Marrakech go from pink to red to almost violet, and in Tangier the sea turns the colour of pewter before it goes dark.

Then there is colour itself. Jacques Majorelle, who came to Marrakech around 1917, took his famous cobalt from the tiles of the city and the robes of the Amazigh men he painted. Walk into his garden and you see it: a blue so strong the cactus beside it looks grey.

Five times a day, from before dawn to after dusk, the adhan rises from the minarets. It is the call to prayer, recited before each of the five daily prayers. Its words say that God is greater and call people to prayer and to success; before dawn it adds that prayer is better than sleep.

In the old medinas a mosque is never far, so you often hear it from several directions at once, one voice starting a breath after the other. It isn't put on for visitors: it is how many people here mark the hours of the day. A long-term visitor in Fes wrote that it seemed abrupt at first, and that after a while he could not picture the medina without it. Listen quietly. Near a mosque door, keep your voice low and your camera down.

Between the calls, the medina has its own sound. In Fes, where no car can enter the old city, the loudest things are hammers: the coppersmiths of the Seffarine square beating trays and cauldrons by hand, as they have for centuries. Then the hooves of a mule and a man behind it saying balak, mind out, and everyone flattening against the wall.

On the Atlantic at Essaouira, the alizé blows from the north-west most of the year and harder in summer. It keeps the town cool when Marrakech, three hours inland, is baking, and it is why windsurfers and kitesurfers come here before anywhere else in Morocco.

You hear it before you see the sea: halyards knocking on masts in the port, gulls hanging over the blue fishing boats, the wind pulling at the ramparts. In the medina, under the walls, carvers work thuya, the knotted root wood of the coast, into boxes and bowls. Stand at their doors and the air smells of resin and sawdust and salt.

Fresh mint, by the armful, on a handcart in the morning. Spice stalls where the ras el hanout, the "head of the shop", is each seller's own mix of their best spices, with no fixed recipe. Bread from the neighbourhood oven, where families still send their dough on a wooden board.

Cedar, too. Morocco holds more Atlas cedar than any other country, most of it in the Middle Atlas above Fes, and the wood carved into the ceilings and doors of the old palaces of Fes and Meknes came from those forests. Walk past a carpenter's workshop in the medina and you'll know it.

And if your trip catches the first rain after a dry spell, notice the lanes: the dust goes dark, and for an hour the whole town smells of wet earth.

Green tea came to Morocco through British merchants in the nineteenth century, much of it landing at Essaouira; with mint and sugar it became the drink of the whole country. It is offered to guests as a sign of welcome, usually more than one glass, and poured from high above the glass so the tea swirls and a little foam forms on top.

Being offered tea is not a sales trick, though a shopkeeper may offer it too. In a home, saying no to the first glass can feel like refusing the welcome itself. Accept, take it slowly, and the conversation that comes with it is the point.

A guest in a Moroccan home may be greeted with dates and milk, then tea, and told to eat more, then more again. Friday's couscous, after the midday prayer, is the meal families gather for. If you are invited, go. Bring something small, like pastries or fruit, and let your host insist.

Inshallah, God willing, follows almost any plan for the future. Sometimes it is a real promise and sometimes a polite maybe, and part of the trip is learning to hear the difference.

Time here bends around people. A five-minute errand can become an hour because someone's cousin knows a shortcut, a shop owner wants to show you his roof, or the tea needs another round. Visitors in a hurry often find this hard on the first day and freeing by the third.

Build slack into your days. Plan one thing in the morning and one in the evening, and leave the middle for whatever happens. Most of what people remember from Morocco happened in the middle.

UNESCO listed this square in 2001 as a masterpiece of oral heritage, not for a building but for what happens on it: storytellers, poets, musicians, healers, Gnawa dancers. In the late afternoon the storytellers draw their circles, mostly Moroccan listeners, in Darija.

As the light goes, the square changes in minutes. Dozens of food stalls appear from nowhere, the grills are lit, and smoke rises in the lamplight. Circles of people form around the Gnawa players with their iron castanets, the qraqeb. The stalls stay open until about midnight.

On your first evening, take a seat on a café terrace above the square and watch for half an hour before you go down. Then walk in, slowly. Eat where the plastic benches are full of local families. Give a coin to the musicians whose music you stopped for.

At Merzouga the dunes of Erg Chebbi rise out of a flat stony plain, and after the sun goes down there is almost nothing to hear. Travellers who sleep in a desert camp describe the silence as total, and a sky so dark the stars look close enough to touch.

It takes a while to get used to. The first hour, people talk. Then they stop. Climb a dune a little away from the camp, sit, and wait until your ears stop expecting something.

Nobody quite agrees why Chefchaouen is blue. Some say Jewish families who settled here painted it for the sky and heaven; others say it keeps mosquitoes away, or the houses cool; some locals say the blue spread in the 1970s to welcome visitors. Each story has its tellers, and none is proven.

What everyone agrees on is the feeling. After the noise of Fes or Marrakech, the town in the Rif mountains is quiet: stairs washed in every shade from indigo to almost white, water running in public fountains, cats asleep on the steps. People who meant to stay a night stay three.

Go early, before the day-trippers. Walk up to the Spanish mosque on the hill at sunset and watch the blue go grey and then gold.

Not every feeling is a good one, and we'd rather say so. Read what travellers write about Marrakech and you'll find two camps, often describing the same streets: people who loved the energy, and people who came home drained. Many who were tired by the big medinas say the countryside, the small towns and the people they met were the best of the trip.

There is also a quieter regret: travellers who read every list of scams, then said no to every glass of tea and every invitation, and went home feeling they had missed Morocco. Saying yes is not the same as saying yes to everything. Agree prices before, not after. Keep the first meeting in public. Then let the conversation happen.

If the medina is too much, step out of it: a rooftop, a garden, a hammam, a day in the mountains. It's part of the trip, not a failure of it.