Fez Artisan Tour: Zellige, Pottery & Leather

Fez has been a craft city for more than a thousand years, and it is one of the last places in the world where an entire medieval workshop economy is still standing and still working. This day takes you past the shopfronts and into the ateliers themselves, where the person explaining the work is the person doing it.

Zellige, the mathematics of tile

In the potteries outside Bab Ftouh you watch grey Fassi clay become the famous blue-glazed ceramics of the city, thrown on a kick wheel and fired in olive-pit kilns. Next door the zellige cutters sit cross-legged with a sharp-edged hammer called a menqach, chipping glazed tiles into furmah pieces by eye alone, with no template and no measurement, then laying them face down into geometric stars that only make sense once the panel is turned over. There are dozens of named shapes, and the masters know them all by heart.

Leather, brass, wood and thread

At the Chouara tannery you look down from a terrace onto the stone vats where hides are still softened, dehaired and coloured with lime, pigeon guano, saffron, poppy and indigo exactly as they were in the fourteenth century. On Place Seffarine the coppersmiths hammer trays and basins into shape, and the chasers punch patterns freehand. In the carpenters quarter around the Nejjarine fountain, cedar is carved for doors and ceilings, and at the looms you see silk thread twisted from agave fibre into the buttons and braid Fez is known for.

What you take away

Not just photographs. You will understand why a zellige panel costs what it costs, how to tell hand-thrown from moulded pottery, which leather has been vegetable-tanned and which has not, and why Fassi craft is protected and taught through a guild system that still functions. If you want to buy, your guide helps you judge quality and price. If you do not, nobody will mind.

Hands on, if you want

Several workshops will let you try: throw a pot, cut a tile, punch a brass tray. Say so when you book and we will build the extra time in. It is the quickest way to understand how much skill is in a pair of hands that have done this since childhood.