Fes Leather Tannery

Luckily for you I am only sharing this to you over the net with pictures. If I could I would also share the smell with you. But since I can't enjoy the view from your own home without the punch to the nose.

Fes is a walled city in the middle of Morocco that goes back to mid-evil times, and some of it has not changed much since then. The Medina is a maze of narrow pathways, some never seeing that light of day in the center of the old part of town. Actually gps and location do not work in them at all because of the large stone buildings that sometimes even turn some of the 9400 streets into tunnels rather. There are not accessible by cars, sometimes motor bikes run up and down them but the main way to get things around is still by donkey, and foot.

We found out the hard way just how extensive these narrow alleys through the Medina are the first night when we set out to get pizza on foot and we entered and soon were lost beyond belief in the dark streets without the aid of gps. But that is a story for another post.

what I found amazing about the Medina is that everything was so compact, but people still lived there, there was industry, there was stables for the donkeys, there were schools, there were mosques, everything was packed into this tight space where cars could not enter, but everything could still be found inside and adapted to the space.

The leather tannery is just one example of this. It has been operational for hundreds of years and it is still basically done the the same way. This is where mainly cow and sheep skin is removed of its hair, treated with chemicals, dyed a color and dried.

I was told that many of the large European and Italian fashion houses and designer labels like Louis Vatton and the likes have been coming here since there start to get the best leather for their designer bags, and shoes.

Before you even reach the main site you begin to smell it in the ally ways. Our guide took us to a shop where we were given fresh mint leaves to wipe on our upper lip and smell to kill our smell temporarily. It helped but was not a complete cure. I must also say the guide was very valuable and necessary, not only for getting us around the medina but by providing inside information and bringing us to this leather shop that had upstairs balconies to provide a birds eye view of the tannery.

This was an amazing experience and like stepping back in time.