In Morocco you don't need a sign to tell you where you are. Look at the wall, and the wall does the rest.

I landed in Marrakech and found everything red: the fences, the houses, even the train station. At first I thought that its people had agreed one morning on one taste, but then it became clear that the story was geological, not aesthetic: the soil of the Haouz plain is saturated with iron oxide, and the ancient builders were pressing this clay into wooden blocks - a technique called “tabbiya” - so the city emerged with the color of its land without permission. If you pass through the old walls, you will notice small, regular holes: these are traces of wood that carried clay eight centuries ago. No one has filled them. The surprise is that color today is not a choice: whoever wants to paint his house in Marrakesh pistachio green, the municipality has a different opinion - red is imposed by decision.
Then I went north to Chefchaouen, the city that the world has thought was blue since time immemorial. In fact, Spanish photographs from the 1920s show it completely white, without a drop of blue. Color came late, and it has three competing narratives: a Jewish community settled there and saw in blue the color of the sky, or that it tricks mosquitoes into thinking the wall is running water and stays away, or simply that it cools homes in the heat of the countryside. The funniest thing is that the municipality distributes paint and brushes every spring, so that the city does not forget its color.

In Rabat, inside the Kasbah of the Udayas, the blue stops at the middle of the wall and the white continues to the top — a custom whose origin is attributed to the Andalusians who crossed the sea and did not forget the colors of their old houses. Painting your wall in two colors because your grandfather lived in Granada is worth a visit.
Asilah is the strangest case: a city that redraws its walls every summer. The story began in 1978 when two intellectuals from the city invited artists to paint the city’s dilapidated walls. The project turned into an annual cultural season that saved the entire town — until it won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1989. A wall painted wins an entire city.

The country goes the same way: Essaouira is white and blue like its salt, winds and boats, Ouarzazate and Ait Ben Haddou Palace are literally the color of dirt because the wall there is the son of the land on which it stands, and Fes is a color similar to pale honey, for which I do not know a name in the color boxes.

I left Morocco convinced that its people did not choose their colors from a dye shop, but from directly under their feet, and from the memories of those who crossed to them from across the sea. What the law and municipalities did later was to confirm what geography and nostalgia did in the first place.

Cities built from its soil resemble its soil; This is why a traveler in Morocco knows where he is before he reads the name of the city on the sign.