42 Fassi families do not introduce the Chouara Tannery as a tourist attraction. They call it work passed down through the same hands, using the same stone pits and the same lime-and-pigeon-dung recipe, for roughly a thousand years. Grokipedia noted in 2025 that close to 500 artisans from more than 300 families still tan hides there today, a few steps from a river the tannery once turned into an open sewer. Above them, on a terrace built for exactly this purpose, forty or fifty tourists gather most mornings, phones raised, while a guide narrates the tanning process in three languages at once. It has happened most working days for well over a decade, and it is one small picture of how the Medina of Fez holds together under what has become, in local tourism-board shorthand, “1.5 million visitors” a year. Fez alone logged 1.67 million overnight hotel stays in 2025, up sharply on 2024, according to Morocco’s National Tourism Observatory, cited in a regional tourism report published in March 2026, a figure regularly rounded to the “1.5 million visitors” shorthand used across the trade. However, overnight stays and unique visitor counts are not strictly identical measures. The Medina of Fez: Nine Thousand Alleys and No Cars Founded in 789 under the Idrisid dynasty and inscribed by UNESCO in 1981 for its outstanding universal value, the Medina of Fez, strictly speaking, Fez el-Bali, the old walled city, is widely described as the world’s largest car-free urban area. As Geography World puts it in 2025, an estimated 9,400 alleys and lanes wind through roughly 300 hectares, many too narrow for anything wider than a loaded donkey, and the district still houses somewhere close to 150,000 residents. Fez’s wider population reached 1.26 million at the 2024 census, making it Morocco’s third-largest city, though the medina functions almost as a separate settlement inside it. This is not a preserved museum piece. It is a working town where goods still move by handcart and pack animal because the alleys were built that way, not because a modern pedestrian zone was retrofitted onto a street grid designed for cars. Sharp turns, covered passageways and deliberately narrow dimensions were medieval defensive and climate choices, not staging for tourists. That distinction matters for judging how the Medina of Fez copes with visitor numbers: it was never engineered for crowds of any kind, so every management decision has had to work around a fixed medieval floor plan rather than a flexible modern one. From Near-Collapse to Restoration Model The medina’s tourist economy exists because of a rescue operation, not a marketing campaign. A Moroccan government report in the late 1980s found that more than half the medina’s buildings were crumbling, with roughly 10% at risk of outright ruin, after decades of underinvestment. UNESCO and Moroccan authorities responded with a five-year joint study that led, in 1989, to the creation of ADER-Fès, the semi-private agency tasked with coordinating rehabilitation. The World Bank followed with a loan in 1993, and the United Nations Development Programme funded a related project in 1992. Together, the interventions eventually targeted roughly 9,000 historic houses, 11 madrasas, 320 mosques, and around 270 fondouks (merchant inns) across the walled city. Residents were not passive beneficiaries of that process. When Moroccan authorities floated a road project to bring vehicle access into parts of the medina in the mid-1990s, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee formally recorded Morocco’s decision to abandon the plan and keep the pedestrian character intact, a case of heritage status actively shaping an infrastructure decision rather than simply documenting one after the fact. Since 2013, the government has poured more than one billion dirhams, roughly $103 million, into further restoration, saving an estimated 4,000 buildings between 2013 and 2018 alone. Fouad Serrhini, head of the agency overseeing the rehabilitation, said buildings were chosen for restoration according to how urgently the work was needed. Yassir Jawra, vice-president of the Fez tourism commission, has described the medina as “an open-air museum, with the largest pedestrian zone in the world.” The Chouara tannery’s crumbling façades were restored between 2015 and 2016 as part of the same push, and the three surviving historic tannery houses, Chouara, Sidi Moussa and Ain Azliten, down from an estimated 86 in the fourteenth century, have since received additional support for pollution control and quality certification. What “Handling” 1.5 Million Visitors Actually Looks Like None of that history answers the operational question: how does a street plan built for donkeys and handcarts absorb the daily reality of coach tours? The answer is largely informal. ADER-Fès mapped the entire road network and engineered ramped routes wide enough for golf-cart-sized emergency and service vehicles to reach within 100 metres of almost any point in the medina, without opening the core to private cars. Waste collection, fire access and construction-material delivery move on this shadow network; tourists and residents share the rest on foot, donkey and handcart. On the marketing side, the Fez-Meknes Regional Tourism Council and Morocco’s National Tourist Office launched a “Shining Fez” repositioning campaign in 2025 and 2026, explicitly aiming to push Fez into the kingdom’s top three destinations and diversify its tourism offer beyond the medina walls. That is a deliberate choice to grow arrivals further, not merely manage the ones already coming, and it sits in real tension with a medina that was never designed to expand its physical capacity. ALSO READ: Libya’s Reopening: What a Post-Conflict Tourism Restart Actually Requires North African Food Explained: Moroccan Tagine, Tunisian Harissa and Egyptian Koshari in Context Spain’s 2026 Visa-Free List Leaves Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya Behind. Here’s Who Made the Cut The Costs the Restoration Budget Does Not Cover The gaps in this model show up less in collapsed masonry than in visitor complaints. A peer-reviewed study of online reviews and stakeholder interviews found that harassment by unofficial guides and street vendors ranks among the most frequently cited problems in the Fez medina, with tourists describing being “constantly approached by self-proclaimed guides” and pressured toward shops that pay those guides a commission. Recent TripAdvisor reviews echo the finding: travellers visiting between late 2025 and mid-2026 describe being deliberately misdirected by informal guides, aggressive youths demanding payment for unsolicited directions, and litter in sections of the medina that restoration budgets have not reached. The medina’s edges have also absorbed direct physical loss. In March 2024, authorities demolished Bab Rcif, one of the medina’s well-known secondary gates, to build a 50-space car park, trading a fragment of the fabric UNESCO protects for a modest amount of parking capacity. Fez as a wider city has also been shaken by fatal building collapses outside the medina walls: two adjoining residential blocks in the Al Mustaqbal district collapsed in December 2025, killing 22 people, five months after a separate collapse killed ten people in the city, both linked to illegally added storeys and uneven enforcement of building codes. Those collapses did not happen inside the UNESCO-protected core, where oversight is comparatively strict. They remain a reminder of how thin Fez’s broader safety-enforcement capacity is once you step outside the heritage perimeter that international funding protects. The RCA Position What Fez Should Change Three changes would close the most visible gaps without undermining what already works. Guide enforcement needs measurable teeth, not another awareness poster. Fez already distinguishes licensed guides from touts, and an undercover tourist brigade has targeted harassment in some form since at least the early 2010s, yet unofficial guides remain one of the medina’s most-cited complaints a decade later. A published, tracked complaint-resolution channel, with enforcement statistics released alongside tourism arrival figures, would test whether the existing brigade model is actually working or merely exists on paper. Tourism revenue should reach the artisan quarters directly, not only restoration contracts. Chouara’s roughly 500 tannery workers earn from tips and terrace sales, not from a formal share of what their workplace generates for tour operators, hotels and the city’s marketing budget. A modest, ring-fenced levy on organised tannery visits, comparable to entrance charges at other working heritage sites internationally, could fund artisan income and the pollution-control work the tannery still needs. Physical heritage needs protection from the same infrastructure logic that removed Bab Rcif for parking. A published, legally binding list of protected gates, walls and structures, with real penalties attached to demolition, would stop the next “temporary” car park from consuming another fragment of the medina UNESCO inscribed in 1981. Fez has built a genuinely rare model for keeping a nine-hundred-year-old walled city alive under mass tourism, restoring collapsing buildings, protecting a street plan with no cars, and turning working crafts into a visible export. However, the money that model generates still flows disproportionately toward government restoration contracts, hotel operators and licensed guides, while the artisan families and derb-level shopkeepers who make the medina worth visiting absorb the overcrowding, the harassment complaints, and the reputational cost almost entirely alone. What the Medina of Fez Model Means for Other African Cities Fez proves something worth taking seriously: a nine-hundred-year-old street plan can absorb millions of modern visitors without turning into a car park or a ruin, provided restoration funding keeps arriving for decades rather than years. Other historic African cities weighing how to open old quarters to tourism have real reason to study ADER-Fès’s model of a dedicated, semi-independent rehabilitation agency, rather than relying on one-off grant projects that end when the funding cycle does. What they should not copy is the part Fez has yet to fix. A visitor economy built without a formal channel for the people living and working inside the walls to share in what it generates is not a finished model; it is an unfinished one that happens to photograph well. The medina’s next decade will show whether Morocco treats artisan and resident welfare as the next phase of the same rehabilitation project that saved the buildings, or as an afterthought to a tourism number the city has already hit. What This Means for Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sector Fez’s numbers dwarf what Africa’s other historic urban and cultural sites currently manage, and that gap is itself the story. Morocco holds nine UNESCO World Heritage Sites; Nigeria holds two, the Sukur Cultural Landscape in Adamawa State and the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Osun State, and neither draws visitor numbers close to Fez’s, largely for lack of the sustained infrastructure investment and dedicated rehabilitation agency that transformed the Moroccan medina. Nigerian commentary on the gap has been blunt: heritage sites elsewhere, from Machu Picchu to Zanzibar’s Stone Town, draw hundreds or thousands of paying visitors daily, while Nigeria’s two UNESCO-listed sites struggle to sustain year-round footfall outside the Osun-Osogbo festival month. The lesson for Nigeria and the wider continent is structural, not cosmetic. A semi-independent agency with a multi-decade restoration mandate, like ADER-Fès, working alongside a marketing body rather than in isolation, like the Fez-Meknes Regional Tourism Council, did more to build Fez’s visitor economy than any single campaign. Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments manages Sukur and Osun-Osogbo without an equivalent dedicated rehabilitation vehicle or the guaranteed multi-year funding that gave ADER-Fès three decades to work. For Kano’s ancient city walls, Benin’s earthworks, and other unlisted African urban heritage sites still awaiting formal recognition, Fez shows that inscription alone changes nothing: sustained institutional capacity, not a UNESCO plaque, converts heritage into tourism revenue and, eventually, into local income. RCA covers the systems behind Africa’s tourism numbers, not just the destinations themselves. If Fez’s restoration model raised questions about how heritage funding actually reaches the people protecting it, read our reporting on the ethics of indigenous tourism in the Omo Valley next, and see how a very different model of cultural access holds up under very different pressure. FAQs How many people visit the Medina of Fez each year? Fez recorded 1.67 million overnight hotel stays in 2025 according to Morocco’s National Tourism Observatory, a figure regularly rounded to the “1.5 million visitors” used in tourism-trade shorthand. However, it measures overnight stays rather than unique visitor arrivals. Why is the Medina of Fez car-free? The medina’s alleys were built in the medieval period for pedestrians, pack animals and handcarts, not retrofitted as a modern pedestrian zone. Narrow passages, sharp turns and covered walkways were originally defensive and climate features, making it the world’s largest car-free urban area today. Who restored the Medina of Fez? ADER-Fès, a semi-private Moroccan agency created in 1989, has coordinated the restoration, working with UNESCO, the World Bank and the Moroccan government since a 1980s report found more than half the medina’s buildings crumbling. Is it safe to visit the Medina of Fez alone? Violent crime against tourists is rare, but harassment from unofficial guides and street vendors is a frequently reported problem, particularly for solo travellers. Hiring a licensed guide, identifiable by an official badge, significantly reduces the risk of being misdirected or pressured into unwanted purchases. What is the Chouara Tannery, and can tourists visit it? Chouara is the largest and oldest of Fez’s three surviving tanneries, still operated by around 500 craftsmen using medieval methods. Visitors can view the tanning pits from surrounding terraces, most of which double as leather shops. Fez MedinaFez tourismheritage tourismMorocco heritage 0 comment 0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinTelegramEmail Oluwafemi Kehinde Oluwafemi Kehinde is a business and technology correspondent and an integrated marketing communications enthusiast with close to a decade of experience in content and copywriting. He currently works as an SEO specialist and a content writer at Rex Clarke Adventures. Throughout his career, he has dabbled in various spheres, including stock market reportage and SaaS writing. He also works as a social media manager for several companies. He holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication and majored in public relations.