There are two ways to visit ruins. One is to look at what is still standing. The other is to ask what the people who built it lived on, and here that question has an answer visible from the entrance.
01 Forty-two hectares in the middle of farmland
The settlement existed from the 3rd century BC, but it grew suddenly under Roman rule from the 1st century AD, until it covered some 42 hectares inside a walled circuit of 2.6 kilometres.
At its largest, in the late 2nd century, it is reckoned that some twenty thousand people lived here, a remarkable figure for a provincial town. And it was not alone: over fifty rural villas have been identified in the surrounding area.
What makes the visit different is the context. The site is not embedded in a modern city or hemmed in by housing: it sits on a slope above ploughed fields, and from inside you see exactly the same productive landscape that sustained it.
02 All of this was paid for by oil
The province exported grain and other goods, but what sustained this city in particular was olive oil. The remains of the buildings given over to pressing are still perfectly recognisable, with their mills and presses, and one has been reconstructed full size.
It is worth understanding why oil was so central. It was not just food: it was lamp fuel, the soap of the bath and the base of much medicine. A city producing oil was producing light, hygiene and medicine at once.
Not even the residue was thrown away. The pressed pulp was fed to animals or dried out to burn in the furnaces of the bathhouses. That is why even the grand houses had their own press: oil was not a separate industry, it was part of how a household ran.
Food, light, soap and medicine came from the same fruit. That is why the city was built where it was.
03 The mosaics are still on the ground
The prosperity from oil was spent on houses, and the houses were paved with large figured mosaics. A good share of them is still where it was laid, open to the sky, inside the walls of the home it was made for.
That is the best and the worst of the site at once. The best, because you see the scene in its own room and grasp the domestic scale. The worst, because they have spent centuries in the open and there are faded or lost patches.
To see them properly there is a practical rule: go early or late in the afternoon. With the sun high, the mosaic washes out and the colours flatten; in raking light, the pattern and the relief of the tesserae come back.
04 And the stone went to Meknes
The city stopped being Roman around 285 and stayed inhabited at least another seven hundred years, until power moved to Fez and the site emptied in the 11th century. What brought it down was not a war: it was an earthquake, the one in 1755.
Then came the quarrying, and here is the detail that links the day's two visits. The fallen stone was carted off to build in Meknes, so the walls and monumental buildings of the neighbouring city have material from this site inside them.
Only about half the enclosure has been excavated, mostly from the 20th century on, and some public buildings and important houses were restored or partly rebuilt. Knowing that changes the reading: what you see standing is, in part, recent reconstruction.
05 Granaries the size of a hangar
The second half of the plan is in Meknes, and it follows the same thread: how what the land produced was stored. The city keeps a group of monumental granaries and warehouses from the early 18th century, with soaring halls and walls whose thickness is measured in metres.
That mass is not ostentation: it is thermal insulation. In a place where summer reaches a mean high of 35.1 degrees, a very thick wall and a single opening keep the inside cool and steady, which is exactly what stored grain needs.
The complex also included a whole hydraulic system of wells, waterwheels, canals and buried pipes. And the stores kept there were said to be enough to last ten years. Whether or not the figure is exact, the scale of the building makes it believable.
06 How to put it together
The plan that works is half a day at the site and half in Meknes, based in the latter because it is some thirty kilometres away. You need a car or a hired taxi: there is no comfortable way to solve it by public transport.
The order matters because of the sun. Go to the site first thing, when raking light brings out the pattern of the mosaics and the ground is not yet baking, and leave the city's interiors for midday, which is where the real shade is.
And if you can pick the month, pick March, April, May or October. In those months the plain is green or freshly ploughed, rain stays within five or six days and highs run from 19.9 to 26.1 degrees. In July the same walk, at a mean high of 35.1 and with no shade, is a different and considerably worse trip.
