Snow in Fez.

Our special affairs editor, Lumen, couldn’t believe her eyes this morning – those looked like awfully large raindrops falling very slowly … Once she’d got her contact lenses in, she could see they really were snowflakes.

That’s the problem with living in a riad – it snows inside your house! In a taxi mid-morning, she could see a sprinkling of snow on the hillside up to the new city, and a thick layer of snow on some of the cars. Kids in the medina scraped snow off the cars to make snowballs.

The airport was closed due to 10cm of snow on the runways – flights from the UK and elsewhere were diverted to Marrakech and Casablanca, and hundreds of tourists bound for Fez were stranded. By mid-afternoon it had all melted in the city, but Mount Zalagh had a pretty coating of white.

The grammar of snow.

Later on in the afternoon, English classes at the American Center were disrupted by students exclaiming at the snow falling again: no, it’s not ‘it snows’, but ‘it is snowing’ – present continuous.

Although it’s extremely cold, it’s unlikely that the snow will settle in the city streets, just on the mountains surrounding Fez. It’s about -2 degrees C tonight. And quite a few of those tourists are expecting a pleasant sunny time in Africa, with the chance to catch a tan on the roof terrace of their riad.

The weather for the next week looks bleak - between 3 degrees Celsius and 16, with showers and maybe, just maybe, more snow.

PS - Oh, I know you are just busting to know if it also snowed in Meknes. Well, the answer is here! The Morocco Report who also has a very fine round up of Moroccan blogs.

Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news