Talking about crafts in Morocco inevitably leads to visual clichés: carpets, lamps, ceramics, or metal trays. Fez allows us to go a little further and understand how these production processes actually work.
The city remains one of the country’s major manufacturing hubs. Its workshops produce some of the best zelliges in Morocco, those geometric mosaics that decorate everything from historic riads to luxury hotels and contemporary interior-design projects in Europe and the Middle East. The same goes for cedar woodwork or decorative plasterwork.
It is not unusual to encounter architects, designers, and international buyers touring the city in search of suppliers. Many of the decorative elements that appear today in designer hotels or high-end private residences come from workshops located behind nearly invisible façades.
The famous tanneries represent the best-known example of this productive tradition. The Chouara tannery, probably the most visited, continues to use techniques that have barely changed for centuries. The large stone vats filled with natural dyes create a recognizable image, but what is truly interesting is to see that the place remains an active and economically significant industrial infrastructure.
