Taza City view, Fès-Meknès Live Cam

Taza stands in the gap between the Rif and the Middle Atlas, the corridor that carries the road east out of Morocco. The webcam looks over Moulay Hassan square with a clock and temperature beside it.

That gap is the reason the town matters. Every army moving between the Atlantic plains and Algeria has had to pass through it, and Taza was fortified accordingly; the Almohads made it their first base in 1132, before they took Marrakesh.

The old town sits on the hill above the modern square, behind walls with the Bab Jemaa gate, and holds a great mosque begun in the twelfth century. The Friouato caves, among the deepest open to visitors in North Africa, are half an hour south.