Chefchaouen - The Blue City
Chefchaouen is famous throughout Morocco for it’s colours, the whole town is painted in various hues of blue, from indigo through cobalt blue to sky blue.
The walls are blue. Not uniformly, not artificially, but in the way that a hillside town painted by many hands over many generations develops a colour that is both coherent and endlessly varied — cornflower in one lane, indigo in the next, powder blue on the doorstep of a house where the paint has been refreshed that morning.
I have been to Chefchaouen several times, and I am still not entirely sure how to account for its effect on visitors. The medina is small by Moroccan standards. The mountains around it are beautiful but not dramatic. The history, while interesting, is not exceptional by the standards of a country that has been building cities for eleven centuries. And yet Chefchaouen produces, in almost everyone I have spoken to who has been there, a quality of calm and enchantment that the larger, more obviously magnificent cities do not always manage. There is something about the scale of it, and the colour, and the pace.
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A City of Refugees and Mountains
Chefchaouen was founded in 1471 by Moulay Ali Ben Rachid, a Moroccan nobleman, as a mountain stronghold to resist the Portuguese expansion along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. The site — a natural bowl in the Rif Mountains, defensible, well-watered by the Ras el-Maa spring — was chosen with military logic. The blue paint came later, and from different directions.
After the fall of Granada in 1492 and the subsequent expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, Chefchaouen received a large influx of Andalusian refugees — people who had lived in southern Spain for generations and now found themselves without a country. They brought their architecture, their music, their craft traditions, and their language: a form of Andalusian Arabic that was still spoken in Chefchaouen’s older families into the twentieth century. The Andalusian influence is visible today in the whitewashed walls, the carved wooden balconies and the barrel-tile roofs that give the medina a character distinctly different from the earthen tones of Marrakesh or Fez.
The Jewish community that settled here — refugees from the same expulsion — is credited by some historians with introducing the blue-washing of the buildings, blue being associated in Jewish tradition with divinity and protection. Others attribute the modern predominance of blue to a mayor in the 1930s who wanted the town repainted. The truth is probably both: a tradition begun by one community, extended and standardised by civic authority. Whatever its origins, the blue has become the city’s identity, and the identity is entirely genuine.
For much of its history, Chefchaouen was closed to non-Muslims. European visitors who entered before the twentieth century did so in disguise, and the few who wrote about it described a town of extraordinary beauty and complete insularity. The French entered it during the Protectorate period of 1920, and the Spanish held it for the following decades of colonial administration. Since independence, it has opened gradually to the world while managing — better than many places — to remain recognisably itself.
The Medina: Small, Blue and Inexhaustible
The medina of Chefchaouen is small enough to walk across in twenty minutes and complex enough to spend two days exploring without exhausting it. Its centrepiece is the Plaza Uta el-Hammam, the main square, where the fifteenth-century Grand Mosque — with its distinctive octagonal minaret, unique in Morocco — stands at one end and the kasbah at the other. The square itself is lined with cafes and restaurants, shaded by orange trees, and functions as the social heart of the city in the way that medina squares always do: everyone passes through it, all day.
The kasbah — a small fortress now containing a modest ethnographic museum and, more valuably, an Andalusian garden of considerable charm — is worth the entrance fee primarily for the tower, from which the view over the medina’s blue rooftops to the mountains beyond is exactly as good as the photographs suggest, and somehow better in person. The garden below, planted with roses and cypress and the sound of a small fountain, is one of the most pleasant places in the city to sit for half an hour.
The lanes of the medina radiate from the plaza in patterns that are best navigated by instinct rather than map. The craft shops here have a higher average quality than in many tourist medinas — the wool blankets and woven textiles are particular to the Rif region and genuinely distinctive, the leather goods well-made, the ceramics local rather than imported from Fez. The traders are, in my experience, less aggressive than in the larger cities, which either reflects the town’s different commercial culture or the fact that the visitor demographic here tends to be more independent and less on a coach tour.
Shopping note: The red-and-white striped blankets — the foutas — woven by Rif women are one of the most authentic and useful things to buy in Chefchaouen. They function as blankets, beach towels, tablecloths or wraps, and are made locally in workshops you can sometimes visit in the lanes behind the main souk.
The Ras el-Maa Spring
At the eastern edge of the medina, where the lanes begin to climb toward the mountains, the Ras el-Maa spring emerges from the rock face and flows through a series of stone channels that have served the city’s washing needs since its foundation. This is a working part of the town, not a tourist attraction: women come here to wash clothes in the traditional way, the water cold and clear and fast-moving from the mountain above. There are riverside restaurants and cafes in the shade of the trees above the spring, and the sound of the water — after the compressed heat of the medina lanes — is genuinely restorative.
The spring is also the starting point for a walk into the mountains above the town, through terraced plots of cannabis — Chefchaouen is the centre of Morocco’s Rif cannabis-growing region, and the plant is grown entirely openly in the surrounding hills — and up to the ruined Spanish mosque on the ridge above the city. The walk takes about forty minutes each way, the path is clear, and the view from the mosque’s promontory over the medina, the valley and the encircling mountains is the finest perspective on the city available.
Go up to the Spanish mosque at dusk if you can manage the timing. The light on the blue rooftops below, the call to prayer rising from the Grand Mosque, the mountains going dark around you — it is one of those moments that travels well in memory.
Beyond the Blue: The Rif Mountains
Chefchaouen is the obvious base for exploring the Rif Mountains, which are among the least-visited uplands in Morocco and among the most beautiful. The range runs along the Mediterranean coast of northern Morocco, covered in cedar and pine above and cultivated terraces below, cut through by river valleys where Amazigh villages have been farming the same land for centuries. The hiking is excellent and the infrastructure for it is improving, though still basic by European standards.
The mountain town of Akchour, about an hour’s drive east of Chefchaouen, is the starting point for walks to a series of waterfalls — the Cascades d’Akchour — through a gorge of extraordinary beauty. The walk is not technically demanding but requires a reasonable level of fitness for the full route to the upper falls. It is one of the finest half-day walks accessible from any Moroccan city.
Getting the Timing Right
Chefchaouen is very photogenic and as such has become very popular, with photographers and instagramers who want to get that perfect photograph the blue streets. This means it can feel in peak summer like a large outdoor photography studio.
The solution is to get there early, be there in the morning. Before nine o’clock the medina is quiet, local, and exactly as beautiful as the photographs suggest. The light is better than at midday. This is the time to get that perfect photo. This is the Chefchaouen worth coming for.
The city is also significantly better in spring and autumn than in summer: the mountain air keeps it cooler than the lowland cities, but July and August bring crowds that the medina’s small lanes handle with difficulty.
I would recommend staying for two nights to get the feel of the city. One night is not enough. If you fancy walking in the nearby Rif Mountains, extend your stay by a night.
Staying: Book accommodation in the medina rather than outside it. The blue of the streets at night, when the tourist day-visitors have gone and the lanes belong again to the people who live in them, is the best version of Chefchaouen. You only get that if you are sleeping inside the walls.