Illustrative photo of Meknes — property galleries are on each booking page.

Where to stay in Meknes

Meknes was Sultan Moulay Ismail's answer to Versailles — a 17th-century capital of monumental gates, granaries, and 45 kilometres of walls, built at a scale that still outsizes its own medina. Quieter and far less touristed than Fes or Marrakech, it's also Morocco's natural base for day trips to the Roman ruins of Volubilis and the holy hilltop town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun.

Meknes became Morocco's imperial capital almost by accident of temperament. When Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif took the Alaouite throne in 1672, he chose the modest Almoravid-era town — founded in the 11th century — as his new seat of power precisely because it had no allegiance to his rivals. Over his 55-year reign, the longest of any Moroccan sultan, he raised a city wall stretching some 45 kilometres around more than 50 palaces, pavilions, and gardens, a project so vast that contemporaries compared it to Louis XIV's Versailles, then under construction in the same decades. Its centrepiece is Bab Mansour, the ceremonial gate to Ismail's royal kasbah: begun under Ismail and completed in 1732 by his son Moulay Abdallah, its green-and-white zellij and Kufic-inscribed marble columns — several looted from Roman Volubilis and Marrakech's El Badi Palace — make it one of the most photographed gates in North Africa. UNESCO inscribed the historic city as a World Heritage Site in 1996.

Where Fes overwhelms and Marrakech performs, Meknes stays low-key — a working provincial capital where the souks, kissaria, and Bab Mansour's Place El Hedim square serve locals as much as visitors, and riads are correspondingly better value. It's also the logical overnight base for the region's two standout day trips: the Roman ruins of Volubilis, 30km north and UNESCO-listed since 1997 for their exceptionally preserved mosaics and triumphal arch, and the whitewashed hill town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun nearby, burial place of Idris I, founder of Morocco's first Islamic dynasty, and off-limits to non-Muslim visitors until 1912. Staying in Meknes means imperial-scale architecture, a genuine medina, and Morocco's best Roman site all within a short taxi ride — with none of the crowds that queue for the equivalent in Fes or Marrakech.

Things to do in Meknes