Fez el-Bali is the old medina that UNESCO lists and that visitors inevitably get lost in, the 9,000 lanes and alleys that no map adequately captures. The medina that is world's largest car-free urban zone, where donkeys and carts move goods that motors cannot reach, where medieval urbanism survives because vehicles cannot enter.

The medina overwhelms with its scale and complexity, the navigation that locals make look easy and visitors find impossible. The medina is experience that defies description; the description always fails.

The Chouara Tannery is Fez's most famous sight and its most pungent, the dyeing pits where leather has been processed for centuries using methods that haven't changed. The tanneries where workers stand in vats of pigeon dung and quicklime, where visitors watch from terraces while holding mint against the smell - the tanneries are Fez's most visceral experience.

The tanneries produce the leather that Morocco exports, the craft that tourism has not replaced. The tanneries are tradition maintained because it works; the smell is the price of authenticity.

Al-Qarawiyyin University may be the world's oldest continuously operating university, founded in 859 when a woman's bequest created the mosque that teaching made university. The university whose graduates include Ibn Khaldun, whose religious education continues, whose library holds manuscripts that centuries have accumulated.

The university represents Fez's scholarly tradition, the learning that made the city important before tourism. The university is why Fez was Morocco's intellectual center; the center has shifted but the heritage remains.

The gates of Fez are what photography features, the ornate portals whose tilework and carving display Moroccan art at its finest. The Bab Bou Jeloud whose blue tiles frame the medina entrance, the royal palace gates whose brass and decoration dazzle - the gates are Fez's architectural statements.

The gates mark transitions between old and new, between inside and outside, between the medina's complexity and the world beyond. The gates are thresholds; the thresholds are ceremonial.

Fez's crafts are what the medina sustains, the workshops where metalwork and woodwork and pottery and weaving continue as they have for generations. The crafts that tourists buy, that export feeds, that tradition maintains - the crafts are Fez's economic base and its cultural heritage.

The crafts create the sounds that fill the medina, the hammering and sawing and weaving that work makes. The crafts are not performance; they are production.