Marrakech before eight o’clock

Everyone warns you about Marrakech at noon: the crush, the heat, the theatre of the souks running at full commercial temperature. The warnings are accurate and beside the point, because they describe a city that only exists between ten and sunset. There is another Marrakech, and it is open for exactly the hours the guidebooks call empty.

At six-thirty the medina smells of wood smoke and wet stone. The bread boys run trays of dough to the communal ovens — neighbourhoods here still bake collectively, a system older than any restaurant — and the cats, who own the city and permit the rest of us to lodge in it, take up their positions in the first warm light. Nobody sells you anything. A man washing his doorstep nods good morning. That nod is worth the flight.

The medina at dawn asks nothing of you. That, in Marrakech, is the rarest luxury on sale.

A dawn itinerary that is barely an itinerary

• Coffee at a counter, standing, wherever the taxi drivers are. One dirham says more than any review.
• Follow a bread tray. It will take you somewhere no map ever has.
• The Bahia Palace at opening time: fifteen minutes of having it almost to yourself.
• Back at the riad by nine, when the courtyard fountain is the correct place to spend the heat.

By ten the other Marrakech takes over, and it is a fine city too — but it performs, and it knows it performs. The dawn city does not know you are there. Travelling slowly is mostly a matter of arranging to be awake when a place forgets its audience.