Chouara Tannery Fez, Morocco. Watch the leather processing and tanning inside 1000 years old tannery.

Animal skin processing and tanning has millennium long tradition in Morocco. Chouara Tannery, Built in the 11th century, is one of the three tanneries in the city of Fez. It is the largest tannery in the city. It is located in the Fes el Bali, the oldest medina quarter of the city, near the river. The tanning industry has been continually operating in Fes using the same technology as it did in the early centuries. Today, the leather production industry in the city is considered one of the main tourist attractions. The tanneries are packed with the round stone vessels filled with dye or white liquids for softening the hides. The leather goods produced in the workshops around the tanneries are exported around the world.

The process consists of two main steps:
1. Cleaning and softening. Hides (skins) of sheep, cows, goats, and camels are processed by first soaking in a series of the white liquids. In order to clean and soften the tough skins these are soaked in stinking mixture of cow urine, pigeon feces, quicklime, salt, and water. This process takes two to three days and prepares the hides to readily absorb the dyes.
2. Dyeing or coloring of the hides. Animal skins are soaked in the dyeing solutions, which use natural colorants such as poppy for red, indigo for blue, and henna for orange. After the dyeing, they are dried under the sun. The resulting leather is then sold to other craftsmen, who use it to produce Morocco's famed leather goods, such as bags, coats, shoes, and slippers, prized for their high quality. The entire leather production process has retained methods unchanged since medieval times. It is based on manual labor only and involves almost no modern machinery.

UNESCO has granted the medina of Fes, where all tanneries are located a the status of World Heritage site of Outstanding Universal Value. Medina of Fes ‘bears a living witness to a flourishing city of the western Mediterranean having exercised considerable influence mainly from the 12th to the 15th centuries, on the development of architecture, monumental arts and town planning’ and because it ‘constitutes an outstanding
example of a medieval town created during the very first centuries of Islamization, citing of Morocco and presenting an original type of human settlement and traditional occupation of the land representative of Moroccan urban culture over a long historical period’

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