Elevated view over the round stone dye vats of the Chouara tannery in Fez at golden hour, with fresh mint in the foreground

Inside the Chouara Tannery: Lime, Pigeon Droppings and a Month in the Vats

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

Raw hides that reach the Chouara tannery in Fez go into a bath of lime and pigeon droppings and stay there for as long as two weeks. Workers stir them regularly. The soak softens the skins and clears away what clings to them, and it happens long before anyone sees a drop of color (Le360).

Most photographs of Chouara show the end of the process: a honeycomb of stone vats filled with red, yellow and blue. The first step looks nothing like that, and smells worse. Two recent reports put the tannery back in front of readers. One is a January 2026 piece from Senegal’s national news agency, distributed by allAfrica. The other is an August 2026 profile from Morocco’s Le360. Both describe work that is still done by hand, in a medina that UNESCO has listed since 1981.

The soak comes first

Hides arrive from the Ain Nokbi market, according to Le360, and go into the lime-and-droppings mixture. Morocco World News, writing in 2024, adds ammonia to the list and puts the soak at several days rather than two weeks. The two accounts don’t reconcile, and neither explains the gap.

They agree on the purpose. The soak softens the skin and clears it so it will take color. The stirring is done by hand. Water is the other requirement, which is why Fez tanneries were built along rivers and canals.

Setups differ from one tannery to the next. Jubber’s 2016 account of a different Fez tannery describes limewater stone pits and a large wooden barrel turned by an electric pulley, a reminder that “by hand” covers more than one arrangement.

A raw cream-colored hide partly submerged in a milky lime solution in a stone pit at a traditional tannery

A month, or close to it

After the soak come the dye vats. The APS report puts dyeing alone at nearly a month, depending on the shade wanted. Morocco World News gives about thirty days for the whole process, ending with a rinse and three days of drying in the sun. Le360 adds that temperature, the amount of material and the time in the vat all change the result.

The dye lists vary by outlet. APS names indigo for blue, poppy for red, mint for green, wood for brown and saffron for yellow. Le360 names rose, cedar wood and saffron, and ties the saffron yellow to ziwania babouches. Morocco World News adds henna for orange. Every list is built from natural materials. No two are the same.

The hides come from four animals, per APS: cow, camel, sheep and goat. After drying they pass to other artisans who cut and sew babouches, bags, wallets and belts. A 2016 account from a different Fez tannery, written by Nicholas Jubber for Wandering Educators, describes skins dried on rooftops, worked with oil and saffron, and weighted down with stones. Finishing meant rubbing the hides over a mushroom-shaped buffing stool to soften them and trimming rough edges with broad knives. The APS report says goods from the Chouara shop sell for 300 to 500 euros.

A walk through the Chouara tannery, filmed by EagleFlyFree.com.
Freshly dyed saffron and rust red hides laid flat on a sunlit rooftop terrace in Fez

Nobody agrees on how old it is

The APS report quotes a guide who puts the tanneries at about 1,200 years old. Morocco World News says nearly 900, with the techniques reaching back about a thousand years and tanning peaking in the twelfth century under the Almohads. The video above calls it a thousand-year-old tannery.

Three sources, three ages. None of them points to a dated record. For a post about leather, the useful reading is that the age is repeated because it sounds right, while the working practice is the part anyone can actually watch.

Who does the work

The headcounts wander too. APS counts more than 280 Berber families living and working at the tannery, with artisans on the job up to 14 hours a day and reported earnings of 500 to 700 euros a month, food and lodging included. Morocco World News counts more than 300 families, around 500 master craftsmen and 1,200 basins.

Visitors get a gentler version. They watch from a terrace and are handed mint leaves for the smell, per APS. Jubber, who spent his day at the other tannery, wrote that “It’s the smell that hits you first”, and described tanners paid by the hide, about one dirham each at the time.

A tanner's dye-stained forearms lifting a wet hide out of a dye vat

What this has to do with a briefcase

None of this is how a Marcellino briefcase gets its leather. English bridle leather comes from a different tradition, tanned with oak bark, and the method is laid out in What English Bridle Leather Actually Is and Is Vegetable-Tanned Leather Actually Better Than Chrome-Tanned, or Just Different? Another slow tradition has its own post: Vegetable Tanning in Tuscany Takes Longer Than Building a House.

The reports on Chouara describe the soak and the dyeing in detail and say little about the tanning agent itself, so this post doesn’t guess at it.

What links Fez to those other places is narrower, and easier to defend. In every one of them, time is an input. The hide isn’t rushed, the person running the process has to read it, and the finished leather carries the evidence. On a bridle briefcase that evidence turns into patina, the subject of Patina Is a Record, Not a Flaw.

Macro photograph of finished vegetable-dyed leather showing natural grain and tonal variation

Learned by standing there

Larbi Iraqi Houssaini has worked at Dar Dbagh Chouara for close to thirty years, Le360 reports. His point is that “You cannot learn this trade just through explanations”: it comes from watching and working beside people who already know. His colleague Mohcine Chelfi puts the tannery’s value in continuity from one generation to the next, and says some gestures are still used there even though production methods have changed elsewhere.

Le360 also notes that the tannery draws visitors from the United States, France, Germany and Italy, while the artisans would like more Moroccans, younger ones especially, to come and look. Whether they will isn’t something the report can say.

A dark brown English bridle leather briefcase with brass hardware on an oak desk beside a window

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