Morocco

To Westerners, Morocco sounds exotic and remote. It is plenty rich in the exotic, but from New York to Casablanca, the distance by air -- 3,600 miles -- is 20 miles fewer than New York to Paris and just 160 miles farther than New York to London.

Casablanca is the hub of airline transportation in Morocco, and most flights between cities are routed through that famous city on the Atlantic Ocean. Rabat, the capital and also on the Atlantic, is a short distance from Casablanca.

Fez, though, is the spiritual and cultural city of Morocco, at times called the Holy City. The medina, or old native quarter, of Fez was selected for the United Nations' World Heritage List in 1981 -- the first site in Morocco on the list -- and later was joined by the medinas in the cities of Marrakech, Essaouira and Tetouan.

Fez, Marrakech, Meknes and Rabat also are called the imperial cities because each has at one time been the capital of Morocco. Founded in the ninth century, Fez is home to an old university.

I am in the medina of Fez in mid-January, and it is quite cold at night, cold enough to have an electric heater to make my room comfortable at La Maison Bleue's riad, a small hotel in what was built as a family palace in 1915.

The typical architecture -- sometimes called Andalusian, Arabo-Andalusian or Moorish -- of these private homes uses an open central courtyard from which the rooms open on each floor, similar to the buildings Moroccans' ancestors built in southern Spain during the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula before they were expelled in 1502. The ceilings are high; the courtyard has a small pool and an orange tree heavy with fruit.

From one end of the top floor, guests can look upward to the 16th-century fortress near the old city wall. It has become the Borj-Nord Museum, housing a collection of weapons. The fortress is most impressive when it is illuminated at night, becoming a crown sitting on the top of the city; it also is one of the best points for a complete view of the city on the hillsides below.

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