Inside a Fondouk in Fès

It was getting warm at the Marinid Tombs and there was hardly any shelter here from the sun apart from the tombs themselves. I don’t want to be hanging around in some tomb just because it was too hot. I head down the hill and dove right back in the medina for more medina madness. Exploring a medina as large as Fès can be very exhausting, especially if you keep getting lost every few minutes. It was very difficult to get my bearings here since the streets can be winding and you would quickly forget where you were supposed to go. On top of that, signs were unhelpful to non-existent in a lot of places. GPS is also useless because the narrow streets and high walls make it difficult to get a lock on the satellites.

This is the way I ended up exploring Fès. I knew that there were several important places here but unless you have a guide, it would be almost impossible to find them. Sometimes you would be right next to it and you wouldn’t even know it. I ended up stumbling into what appears to be some sort of shopping arcade. There were multiple floors here and it was filled with stalls. It seems to be a more sanitized version of the medina, but I learned that this is called a fondouk. This one in particular seem to have been restored very recently and it probably looks out of place with the rest of the medina. It was almost like you stepped into another dimension and all the dirt and grime of the medina is all gone. The architectural style of the fondouk is interesting here. But probably not as nice as the others I have seen.

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