Step off Place Nejjarine into a tall, three-storey courtyard ringed by identical arched galleries and you've arrived at the Funduq al-Najjarin, the 1711 caravanserai built by Alaouite sultan Moulay Ismail to house merchants and their loaded mules on the carpenters' square. Fifty-one rooms wrap around the courtyard; the building was classified a national historic monument in 1916 and then sat in slow decay for most of the twentieth century.

A private restoration funded by Mohammed Karim Lamrani ran from 1990 to 1996, on a budget of around eighteen million dirhams, and the building reopened on 23 May 1998 as the city's museum of Moroccan woodworking. The galleries are arranged simply: cedar doors and ceilings on one floor, Quranic writing boards from msids (prayer schools), mashrabiya screens, Amazigh trunks, and Andalusi-style musical instruments on the others. The pieces come from across the country, with a deliberate contrast between the Fassi urban tradition and the Amazigh rural one.

Save energy for the rooftop terrace at the top, which has a small café and a view that takes in the Nejjarine quarter, the surrounding souks and the al-Qarawiyyin minaret. Step back out onto the square afterwards to look at the Nejjarine Fountain — an early-19th-century zellij-clad saqayya designed to echo the funduq next door, used historically for ablutions and one of the most photographed corners of the medina.