Riad Jnan El Cadi

The Riad Jnan El Cadi holds in nine rooms behind a medina door, at the end of the derb El Cadi, in the Azbest quarter, north of the old town. The house long carried the name of Riad Mektoub, before becoming Jnan El Cadi in the late 2010s, which its booking address still recalls. It stands 600 metres from Jemaa el-Fna, that is about ten minutes on foot to the square and the souks, a little more to the Bahia palace. You are in the middle of the medina, but off the pressure of the great trading arteries, in a residential derb where you mostly hear the fountain.

The court, two levels high, unfolds its arched sculpted-cedar galleries, its zellige floor, a palm rising towards the open sky and a flowered basin at the middle. It is a real house court, cool and dim, where breakfast is taken and where you retreat when the medina bakes outside. The nine rooms are spread around and on the floors, each in a plain Moroccan register - lime and tadelakt walls, vaulted-headboard beds set in an alcove, Berber hangings, wrought-iron grille windows. The rooms are billed as soundproofed, which counts in a lived-in quarter.

On the terrace, a real pool, wide enough for a few strokes, ringed with sun loungers and parasols, open onto the rooftops and the minarets. Where most medina riads offer a water point for cooling off, you swim here for real, in the open sky. On the ground floor, a traditional hammam in tadelakt lets you close the day with a scrub or a massage, on booking, and the house serves two tables, with breakfast included and Moroccan cooking on request. Travellers give the address 9.3 on Booking on over twelve hundred reviews, with a 9.9 mention for the hosts’ welcome, which says where the stay plays. For anyone after that up-high swim first, the quarter has no shortage of houses that moved their basin to the terraces: see the roof-pool riads.

That leaves who it fits. The first caveat has to do with the roof itself: the pool is in full sun, with no permanent shade above the water, pleasant in shoulder season but scorching in high summer, when the terrace empties at hot hours. Access goes on foot through lanes sometimes crowded with carts and mopeds, and the house is climbed by stairs, no lift: big cases have to be hauled by hand over several levels. Wi-Fi, rated 8.4, stays the weak point of the readings, worth planning for if you work. For a couple or two friends wanting a real medina house, calm, an on-site hammam and most of all a pool where you swim from around £68 a night, the address lands right and is well placed. For anyone expecting hotel services with a lift, a shaded pool or palace standing, better look elsewhere. Here, you pay first for an old court, a hammam and an open-sky swim in the middle of the old town.