Why does Google Maps mislead you more here than at home?

Google says turn right. You turn right. It's a wall. Google recalculates. It says turn left. You turn left. You're in someone's living room.

Google Maps was built for grid cities. The medina is not a grid. It's a three-dimensional network where streets pass under buildings, split into levels, change width from two meters to forty centimeters, and sometimes exist as passages through private homes that are open during the day and locked at night.

GPS compounds the problem. Satellite signals bounce off the high walls and tight canyons of the medina, creating positioning errors of ten to thirty meters. In a city where parallel streets can be five meters apart, a thirty-meter error puts you on the wrong street entirely. The blue dot lies with confidence.

The map itself is incomplete. Google's data depends on Street View cars and user contributions. Street View cars cannot enter streets narrower than their wheelbase — which excludes most of the medina. User-contributed data is patchy and often wrong. Entire passages are missing. Others are marked as through-streets but have been bricked shut for years.

Locals navigate by landmarks, not maps. The fountain, the mosque, the bakery smell, the tree growing through the wall, the blue door. When you ask for directions, you'll get: "Go toward the smell of bread, turn left at the mosque, ask again." This system works. It has worked for a thousand years. Google has been trying for fifteen.