Who repairs a medina?

An old city is not a monument. It is thousands of privately owned buildings, most of them lived in, many held in complicated shared inheritance, and all of them requiring maintenance that costs more than the families inside them can raise.

Fez el-Bali has been the laboratory for this problem for thirty years. A long-running programme has stabilised hundreds of structures, rebuilt the tanneries' water system and restored funduqs that had become ruins with trees growing through them.

The financing is where the difficulty starts. Restoration paid for by conversion — a riad becomes a guesthouse, a funduq becomes a boutique hotel — saves the building and changes the neighbourhood. Enough conversions and the residential population that made the medina a living place moves out.

Some cities are now trying to steer the balance directly, with grants that require continued residential use, or limits on the number of guesthouse licences per quarter. Results so far are early and uneven.

As a visitor the leverage is small but real: staying somewhere that employs and buys locally, using the workshops rather than the export showrooms, and understanding that the alley you find charming is somebody's front garden.