Pretty City: Volubilis and Moulay Idriss

Before there were Arabs but after there were Berbers, Morocco also had Romans, and man did those Romans like to build stuff all over the place. At the entrance of Volubilis, a map shows the fantastic spread of the ancient Roman Empire across Europe, the mideast and north Africa, and put context to the stone ruins that have sat for millennia on this pretty hillside in central Morocco amidst the tall grass and wildflowers.

Volubilis is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and rightly so. The ruins reveal how houses were arranged along a main street, where public spaces existed for worship and government, and how water and heating were manged in the unrelenting Moroccan climate.

I had taken public transportation an hour or so to reach this spot, and among the busload of locals were two people I marked as fellow travelers. As we exited at Moulay Idriss, we realized we were also neighbors: they were father and daughter from a Quebec town just over the Vermont border. We spent the day walking among the ruins, picking over stones, resurrecting in our minds what stood here, marveling at the engineering of it all.

A short taxi away was the hillside town of Moulay Idriss, a village so central to the origin story of Islam's blossoming in Morocco that non-Muslims weren’t allowed in the town until 2005 and a wooden beam bars them still from getting too close to the Mosque. This reminds me of Soviet cities that were closed to foreign visitors for the importance of the military or research secrets that were held there, and I spent a good part of the steep uphill walk to the top of town pondering the human impulse to barricade and encircle ourselves — whether to keep us in or others out, and what’s the difference exactly?

Moulay Idriss occupies a hillside, with white plaster houses stacked neatly in terraces cascading down from the top of a hillock. We climbed and wended our way through small residential streets with the help of little kids who tagged along hoping for a coin or piece chocolate, all of us babbling the same conversation about directions to our destination: “Grande terrasse?” “Oui, grande terasse!” From the highest, largest terrace, we sat with a commanding view of the rolling hills below us and Volubilis a few miles away.

[Volubilis and Moulay Idriss: March 2018]