Morocco Culture and Etiquette Guide

Morocco is an Arab country and an Amazigh one, and the constitution says both. Arabic and Tamazight are the official languages, French does a great deal of business and Spanish is common in the north. Which of those you hear depends on where you are standing, and none of them is a substitute for the others.

Say Amazigh rather than Berber. The older word came from outside and the people it describes did not choose it.

The medina is a neighborhood

The single most useful adjustment a visitor can make is to stop reading the old city as an attraction. UNESCO describes the Medina of Fez as transmitting a way of life, skills and a culture that persist and are renewed, and in the same document records an over-populated quarter and buildings threatened with collapse. Both halves are one fact: people live there.

That changes what a walk through the tanneries is. It is a tour of a workplace, conducted at the pace of the work, and a good deal of what you are shown is somebody's front door. Ask before photographing, and accept no as an answer without negotiating it.