Historic City of Meknes

Moulay Ismaïl, founding sultan of the Alawite dynasty, made Meknes his capital between 1672 and 1727 and rebuilt it on an imperial scale: colossal walls, monumental gates and a Spanish-Moorish cityscape mixing Islamic and European tastes of the 17th-century Maghreb. The town itself is older, begun by the Almoravids as a military settlement in the 11th century. UNESCO inscribed the historic city in 1996.