Tangier

Tangier sits at the very top of Morocco, looking across the Strait of Gibraltar at Spain, and that position is the whole story: it is the country’s easiest UK arrival, a working ferry city, and the obvious launchpad for the blue-city north. The mistake is treating it as a destination you fill a week with. The medina is smaller and steeper than Fez or Marrakech, the kasbah and Café Hafa give you a brilliant day and a half, and after that the city’s best move is to send you somewhere — Chefchaouen’s blue lanes, the artists’ town of Asilah, or south on the high-speed train.

Where you stay shapes the trip. A restored riad inside the medina puts you among the lanes near Petit Socco, with the trade-off that cars cannot reach most doors and you walk the last stretch with your bag. Marshan, just above the old city, is calmer and more local, with Café Hafa and the best small eateries; the Boulevard in the Ville Nouvelle is the modern-hotel fallback for door-to-door taxis and an early flight.

One booking decision matters more than any other if you are arriving by sea: take the Tarifa ferry, which lands at Tangier Ville in the city itself, rather than Algeciras, which goes to Tanger Med 40km east. Below, the structured planning — where to stay, what to see, airport transfers, the onward bus and train links, and a realistic budget in pounds — picks up from here. Entry, health and safety facts inherit Departly’s Morocco country guide, including the closed-currency dirham and the no-GHIC rule that make insurance and on-arrival cash non-negotiable.