Morocco

The master and his line

Morocco runs on the master system. A craftsman apprentices for a decade or more under another before he earns the title, and some families have held a single trade through fifteen generations. The work is geometry made visible. Tile cut by hand against a blade, cedar carved with calligraphy, copper raised under the hammer.

Beneath the craft lies the Sufi tradition, its poetry and its remembrance, the quiet spiritual ground these trades first grew from.

The places worth the journey

Fez keeps the oldest medina and the heart of the tile and leather trades. The Atlas mountains hold the Berber weaving villages and their plant dyes. Marrakech gathers the metalworkers and the long arcades of the souks. Tetouan, in the north, carries its Andalusian inheritance through a white old town.