Tetouan Food Tour — The Andalusian Medina & Its Markets

Tetouan — the "white dove," nicknamed for its whitewashed houses — has one of the best-preserved and least-touristed medinas in Morocco, a UNESCO World Heritage site that still functions as a working Andalusian-Moroccan town. A food tour here is a rare chance to eat through an authentic old city where the vendors serve locals, not tour groups, and the Hispano-Moorish heritage flavours everything.

The medina's markets bring together the Rif mountains and the Mediterranean: country produce, herbs and fresh cheese brought down from the hills; fish and seafood from the nearby coast at Martil and M'diq; and the spice, olive and dried-fruit sellers of the Moroccan pantry. Your guide walks you through the souks, the food counters and the ferrans, tasting as you go.

Tetouan's Andalusian character shines in its sweets, and the tour makes the city's celebrated pastries a highlight, alongside the street classics — msemen and harcha off the griddle, bissara soup, grilled snacks — and the local specialities shaped by Spanish and Jewish heritage. A stop for mint tea in the atmospheric medina rounds it out.

Because Tetouan is so far off the tourist circuit, the tour is warm, unhurried and genuinely local, and the medina itself — a maze of white lanes below the Rif — is a delight to explore. Bring small cash for the stalls, and let the guide introduce a city most visitors to Morocco never see. It pairs well with a pastry workshop or cooking class.