Chefchaouen after the day trippers leave.

Chefchaouen receives an enormous number of people who are there for about five hours. The coaches arrive from Tangier and Fes between ten and eleven, everybody walks the same four lanes, eats on the same square, photographs the same staircase, and is gone by four. Between four in the afternoon and ten the following morning it is a different town, and almost nobody sees it.

The blue is the reason everyone comes and it is also the least interesting thing about the place. It is repainted every few years, the explanations for it are contested, and in the middle of the day under a high sun it photographs flat. At six in the evening it does what people came for. At seven in the morning, wet from the night, it does something else again.

What fills the hours in between is the Rif, which starts immediately behind the town and which almost no visitor enters. The path to the Spanish mosque takes twenty minutes and most people do it at sunset with a crowd. The path into the Talassemtane forest takes considerably longer and you will meet nobody on it but goats and, higher up, the men working the cannabis terraces that are the region’s actual economy.

The food is different here too, which surprises people who have come up from Marrakech. Goat cheese, which barely exists further south. Bread cooked differently. A tagine with plums that nobody in Fes would recognise. The kitchens are Andalusian and Rifi rather than Arab-Moroccan, and two nights is enough to notice.

There is not much music, and I want to be honest about that. The Rif has its own repertoire and its own metre, and you will hear it at a wedding or in a house rather than anywhere a visitor can simply turn up. We run a workshop here for that reason. It is two hours in somebody’s front room and it is the only reliable way in.

Stay two nights. The first evening you will see why people photograph it. The second morning, before the coaches, you will see why people live here.