Chefchaouen is a town in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco, its medina painted blue from doorstep to rooftop, no two walls quite the same shade. The lanes are barely two people wide, so the colour changes at every turn: cobalt under your feet, powder blue at shoulder height, indigo in the shadowed archways. It is not as old as it looks. Photographs from the 1930s show only scattered blue houses; the uniform indigo consolidated from the 1970s as travellers arrived. Nobody can prove who started it; the likeliest story goes back to the town's Sephardic Jewish community, for whom blue is sacred. It had been shut to outsiders for 450 years, founded in 1471 as a fortress against the Portuguese; the first Christians to walk in, in the 1920s, found people still speaking medieval Spanish.
The medina is small enough that walking without a destination costs you nothing. At its upper edge the mountain water comes out of the rock at the Ras el-Maa spring and runs through open channels where laundry is still washed. A half-hour climb up the bare hill to the east reaches the Spanish Mosque, the town's favourite sunset spot and a building nobody would pray in. The Spanish put it up in the 1920s for a town they had just occupied, and residents, suspecting a lookout, stayed away. From its terrace the blue houses stack down the slope in one sheet, the two Rif peaks behind. Late in the day the walls stop being blue and go faintly violet while the white plaster edges pick up gold. The rooftop terraces above Uta el-Hammam square are where you sit with mint tea and watch it happen. An hour out of town the Akchour cascades run through a green limestone gorge, full in spring and a thread by late summer. The park those hills belong to, Talassemtane, exists for a tree: the Moroccan fir, which grows on almost no other mountain. The blue itself is renewed by hand, house by house, with lime and pigment, and at the door handles you can count the coats.