The first shock, at Chouara, is not visual. It is the smell. Something between vinegar, ammonia and damp earth. On arriving you are handed a fresh mint leaf to breathe — a gesture become a tourist ritual, but which also tells the truth: you do not last long with nothing.

I went up to the terrace of a leather shop, like everyone. That is how one reaches the best views — the sellers of babouches and bags take advantage of the visitor flow to sell, and in exchange let you look. The maâlem Abderrahim Bennani, sixty-three, a tanner at Chouara since the age of eight, signalled to me from below. He was mid-thigh in an indigo dye vat, his forearms a blue no photograph will ever render.

I. Twelve hundred years

Chouara has existed since the founding of Fès. Idriss II established the city in 809; the first tanneries are attested from that era, because no Muslim city could function without its leather — for saddles, waterskins, babouches, belts, bookbindings. But it was under the Marinids, in the 14th century, that Chouara took on the aspect it has today: a grid of circular vats, cut into the stone, organised on two superimposed levels and linked by a precise hydraulic chain.

Ali ibn Abi Zar, the Fassi chronicler who wrote the Rawd al-Qirtas around 1325, counted in his day eighty-six active tanneries in the medina. Today three survive: Chouara (the largest, about twelve hundred vats), Sidi Moussa, and Aïn Azliten. The others were gradually absorbed by residential expansion, or closed for lack of successors.

Eighty-six. The figure is dizzying. It says what Fès was: not a city that produced leather for its own use, but the great export centre of medieval Morocco. Italian travellers, from the 13th century, brought back to Venice and Genoa Moroccan leathers — precisely Fès leather — for bookbinding, luxury leather goods, court belts. The word maroquin, in French — which still today designates a goat leather tanned with sumac — comes directly from Maroc (Morocco).

II. The white bath

"The secret is the lime," Abderrahim tells me. He has just come up from a vat. His feet are white to the calves, as if he had walked in flour. The first vat into which a hide is plunged — freshly received from the abattoir, still bearing flesh and hair — is a vat of lime mixed with pigeon droppings. The mixture seems grotesque; it is in fact of great chemical logic.

Quicklime, hydrated into slaked lime on contact with water, releases the keratin of the hair — the hide then lets itself be unhaired in a few days. Pigeon droppings, rich in urea and uric acid, bring the enzymes that soften the collagen. This is what is called the confit in French — a word that joined the cuisine of the south-west but whose origin is tannery. For three to five days, the hides float in this cloudy mixture, at the outside temperature, under the Fès sun.

The pigeons of the medina feed the vats. Several hundred birds nest in the crevices of the roofs that overlook Chouara. A discreet economy organises itself around them: collectors gather the droppings in bags, bring them to the tanners, who pay by weight. No one has ever measured the tonnage precisely, but the volume required to run Chouara is estimated at several tonnes a year.

III. The unhairer's gesture

Once the hide is brought up from the white bath, it is spread on a wooden trestle — called a tnaja — and the unhairer (the mounajjid) works it with a blunt knife. The gesture is lateral, precise, repeated: the blade does not cut, it scrapes. The hair falls in white plaques. The remaining flesh is detached the same way, on the reverse of the hide. At this stage one obtains a hide "in the tripe" — moist, elastic, slightly rubbery, and completely bare.

This step, in industrial Europe, is done by machine. At Chouara, it is still done by hand, and it is here that the final quality of the leather is played out: a knife stroke too heavy gashes the hide, which will be discarded or sold cheaper. A stroke too light leaves hair, which will prevent the dye from taking. The mounajjid learns this gesture over two to three years, under a master's supervision, with no pay other than a meal and a tea.

Hamza, twenty-three, the son of a tanner and Abderrahim's nephew, is in his second year of apprenticeship. "My father wanted me to go into commerce," he tells me, crouched near a vat, his plastic sandals abandoned on the edge. "But when you are born in the tannery, you come back to the tannery. It is not a choice." He did three years of law at the Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, then stopped everything. His family did not approve. He says it is the only clear decision he has made in his life.

IV. The tree, the memory, the tannin

After rinsing comes the step that gives the trade its name: tanning. At Chouara, one tans with vegetable tannin. No chromium (the 20th-century European industrial technique), no aluminium salts. The tanning bath is prepared with imported mimosa or quebracho bark powder, sometimes mixed with gall nut, cork-oak bark or sumac harvested in Morocco. The hide stays there between twenty and thirty days, turned and stirred by hand.

"The tannin enters the hide as love enters the heart," Abderrahim tells me without smiling, stirring the bath with a long stick. "Slowly. If you force it, it does not hold." The tannin fixes on the collagen fibres, stabilises them, prevents putrefaction. A well-tanned hide keeps a hundred years, two hundred years. The 16th-century Fassi bookbindings, kept at the Quaraouiyine library, are still intact: the tannin made them imputrescible.

V. The blue, the orange, the yellow

Then comes the dyeing. The colour baths — the ones that make the postcard image of Chouara — are in fact the fastest step: three to five days per vat. But the preparation of the natural pigments takes weeks. Indigo (the nila) crushed in a mortar, diluted in warm water, fermented three days so it releases its colourant; dried and boiled poppy for red; saffron petals for the deep yellow-orange; henna for the light orange; mint for the green hues; walnut husk for the browns; cedar tar for the blacks.

Each tanner has his pigment supplier, and each family of tanners has its signature hue that it reveals to no one. The colour of Chouara is not standardised — each vat produces a variation. A Fassi maâlem recognises at first glance a leather dyed at the Bennanis', the Boutahars', or the Idrissis'. It is this signature of colouring that justifies, on the international market, the price of true maroquin against industrially dyed leather: there is, in the hue, a recognisable hand.

For the blue of Chouara — the one that covered Abderrahim's arms — the recipe is handed from father to son, never in writing. "My grandfather learned it from his. I learned it from my father. My son does not want to learn it. But Hamza, perhaps." Hamza, balanced on the edge of a neighbouring vat, nods without answering.

VI. Three days on the roofs

The dyed hides, wrung out, are spread on the terraces of the medina. Seen from the sky, Fès becomes a great abstract painting: hundreds of red, blue, yellow squares, scattered on the roof-terraces between Chouara, Sidi Moussa and Aïn Azliten. The drying lasts three days in summer, up to a week in winter. It is there that the colours fix definitively — the air and the sun finish what the baths began.

These roof-terraces have, for centuries, been dedicated to this use. The families owning the riads leased to the tanners receive a modest but perpetual rent. It is one of the many invisible threads that link the inhabitants of the medina to the tannery — without knowing it, many Fassis still live above the leather.

VII. What is lost

Abderrahim says he has seen Chouara empty out. When he began, at eight, there were more than twelve hundred active tanners. Today there are about five hundred. Half the stone is cold. Some vats are closed off with wooden planks, covered with moss — they have not tanned for twenty or thirty years, but no one destroys them. "We wait. Maybe one day someone will want to start again."

The reasons for the decline are known: the competition of European, Indian, Turkish industrial leather, which floods the market of babouches and bags; the cost of raw materials (mimosa bark tripled between 2018 and 2024); the physical fatigue of the trade — a tanner works standing in water and chlorine nine to ten hours a day, without a mask, without gloves, and ends with respiratory and skin problems; and above all, the vanishing of desire.

"The young no longer want to," says Abderrahim, as if stating a meteorological fact. "They are right. If I were young today, I would want something else too." Hamza had come to join us. He listened to his uncle's sentence without a word. Then he said: "If we all leave, who will do it?"

VIII. What is kept

Part of Chouara was restored in 2016 within the joint programme of the Ministry of Culture, ADER-Fès (the Agency for the de-densification and rehabilitation of the medina) and the World Bank. Three hundred vats were restored, the hydraulic system was partly renovated, and a viewpoint was arranged for visitors — without modifying the productive function of the site. The programme — discreet, with no loud communication — is cited as an example by ICCROM (the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) in the documentation on the rehabilitation of historic tanneries.

Several young Fassi master-craftsmen have organised since 2022 into an association — Damanat al-Jild, "Leather Guarantees" — to defend the sector, structure marketing, and launch a PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) process for "vegetable-tanned Fès leather." The file is under examination by OMPIC. If the PGI is granted, the leather of Chouara will join the argan of Essaouira and the rose of Kelaât M'Gouna among the Moroccan products protected at the European level.

IX. Coda

I went back down into the leather shop. The merchant showed me a selection of babouches, bags, poufs. All had come from Chouara, by the passage I could see from the terrace. The leather was smooth, lightly perfumed, alive. I thought of Abderrahim's hand, blue with indigo to the elbow. I thought of Hamza, who did not yet know if he would stay.

On the way back, in the alley climbing towards Talaa Kbira, I crossed a donkey driver carrying two bundles of fresh leather — still damp — towards the upstream merchants. He had bought them from a tanner who had dyed them four days earlier. In ten days, perhaps, these hides would become babouches worn in Casablanca, Marrakech, Paris, Tokyo. No one would know that to make them it had taken twelve hundred years, pigeon droppings, and a man with blue arms.

X. Sources and reading

1. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Medina of Fès, inscription 1981, criteria (ii) and (v). whc.unesco.org/fr/list/170.
2. Ali ibn Abi Zar — Rawd al-Qirtas, a chronicle of Fès written around 1325. Critical edition: A. Huici Miranda, Valencia, 1964.
3. ADER-Fès — Agency for the de-densification and rehabilitation of the medina of Fès. Chouara restoration programme, 2014-2016.
4. ICCROM — International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property. Documentation on the rehabilitation of historic tanneries. iccrom.org.
5. Maison de l'Artisan — Mapping of the trades of Fès-Meknès, leather sector. maisondelartisan.ma.
6. OMPIC — Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property. PGI procedure. ompic.ma.

— Aïcha Bennani —
Fès, February 2026