Tangier - Gateway to Morocco
Tangier exists at the intersection of two worlds — a place where continents, cultures, languages and ambitions collide and produce something that could not have been created anywhere else. Tangier is one of those cities. It sits at the northwestern tip of Africa, fourteen kilometres from Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar, and for much of its history it has been precisely what its geography suggests: a threshold, a crossing point, a city that belongs entirely to neither shore.
I came to Tangier first in the mid-nineties, arriving by ferry from Algeciras on a bright July morning with a list of artisan contacts and no particular expectations. When I got off the ferry, it was as if I had landed on a different planet, the ferry in those days took around 90 minutes, but the place I landed, as a 21 year old, was so utterly different from anywhere I had ever been to before, so utterly different from the Europe I had just travelled from.
What I found was a city of extraordinary layering — Moroccan and European, ancient and sharply modern, spiritually Islamic and historically dissolute — that I have been returning to ever since. It is not Morocco’s most conventionally beautiful city. But it may be its most interesting. Let me tell you about Tangier.
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A City That Governed Itself — and Everyone Else
Tangier’s history is a sequence of foreign powers discovering that the city is easier to desire than to hold. The Phoenicians were here. The Romans named it Tingis and made it the capital of the province of Mauritania Tingitana. The Byzantines held it briefly. The Arabs took it in 705 AD and brought Islam, which has been the city’s spiritual constant ever since, even through the centuries of European entanglement that followed.
The Portuguese seized Tangier in 1471. The Spanish took it from them. In 1661, Charles II of England received it as part of the dowry when he married Catherine of Braganza, and the English held it for twenty years before abandoning it — the fortifications too expensive to maintain, the Moroccan harassment too persistent to ignore — and blowing up their own fortifications as they left rather than cede them intact. Moulay Ismail took the city in 1684, and it remained Moroccan until the twentieth century brought a new and more complicated form of foreign involvement.
Between 1923 and 1956, Tangier existed as an International Zone, jointly administered by France, Spain, Britain, and eventually other powers, with its own legal system, its own currency, and effectively no enforceable law at all. This was the Tangier of legend: the Tangier of William Burroughs writing Naked Lunch in a hotel room in the Petit Socco, of Paul and Jane Bowles making the city their permanent home, of Henri Matisse finding in its light and colours a transformation of his painting. The International Zone attracted writers, artists, spies, tax exiles, fugitives and adventurers in roughly equal measure. The city’s reputation for licence, intrigue and creative freedom dates entirely from this period.
Tangier has come a long way since I first came to Morocco in the the 1980’s. Then I vividly remember being told to be careful of locals who volunteer to guide you around. The scam was that they would take you on a circuitous route through the medina, get you completely lost then demand payment to show you the way back to your hotel. And of course, despite being warned, it happened to us on our first night, that and being offered hashish on every street corner! The hashish scam was that the guy who sold you the hash would then report you to an ‘undercover policeman’ who would then issue you with an on the spot fine, which he would then share with the person you sold you the ‘hash’ in the first place!
Happy Days! It was like the wild west! But google maps put an end to the getting lost in the medina scam, and Morocco realised that allowing tourists to get scammed as soon as they got off the boat from Spain really didn’t help it’s image.
The Tangier you find these days has been cleaned up since those heady days, and is all the better for it.
Since independence and reunification with Morocco in 1956, Tangier has had a complicated relationship with its own legend. For decades it was somewhat neglected, its port facilities decayed, its reputation preceding it in ways that were more hindrance than help. In the early 2000s, King Mohammed VI took a personal interest in its regeneration, and the transformation has been substantial. The port has been modernised, the corniche rebuilt, the medina restored. Tangier is now a serious city again — the country’s second port, a major industrial and financial centre, the northern terminal of Morocco’s high-speed rail line. The legend remains, just brought into the 21st Century.
The Medina and the Kasbah
Tangier’s medina is smaller and more manageable than those of Fez or Marrakesh, and the relative ease of navigating it is one of its pleasures. Enter from the Grand Socco — the large circular plaza that marks the boundary between the medina and the French-built ville nouvelle — and you are immediately in a web of lanes that run downhill toward the port and uphill toward the kasbah. The smell is of spice and diesel and sea salt. The sounds shift between Arabic, Moroccan Darija, French and Spanish within the space of a hundred metres.
The Petit Socco — the Zoco Chico — is the medina’s central square, and it is one of the great people-watching locations in North Africa. The cafes around its perimeter have been here, in one form or another, since the International Zone days. Sit at Café Central or Café Tingis with a mint tea and watch the city flow past. The square has a slightly cinematic quality, as if aware of its own history, but the life playing out in it is entirely real: old men in djellabas, young men in trainers, women with shopping baskets, the occasional bewildered tourist from the ferry.
The kasbah occupies the highest point of the old city, reached by climbing through increasingly quiet lanes from the Petit Socco or via Bab Haha from the north. It is a walled citadel within the city, built on a promontory above the strait, and the views from its ramparts — Spain visible on a clear day, the Atlantic and Mediterranean meeting somewhere below you — are among the finest urban viewpoints in Morocco.
At the heart of the kasbah is the Dar el-Makhzen, a former sultan’s palace built in the seventeenth century by Moulay Ismail — the same sultan who took the city from the English — and now housing the Museum of Moroccan Arts. The building is as interesting as the collection: carved wooden ceilings in the reception rooms, a courtyard of marble and mosaic, gardens that are surprisingly tranquil given the city around them. The museum contains artefacts from Volubilis and across Morocco’s history, and a mosaic from the Roman period that has survived two thousand years in better condition than most modern flooring.
Worth noting: The kasbah museum is closed on Tuesdays. The best time to visit the kasbah itself is early morning, before the tour groups arrive from the ferry port, or late afternoon when the light on the strait is extraordinary.
The Literary City
The American Legation Museum deserves a particular mention. Located in the medina, it occupies the building given to the United States by the Moroccan sultan in 1821 — the first American public property abroad, and the only National Historic Landmark located outside the United States. It is now a cultural centre and museum dedicated to the history of American-Moroccan relations and to the literary culture of the International Zone.
The collection includes correspondence, photographs and manuscripts relating to Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and others who passed through or settled in Tangier during its bohemian heyday. But the building itself is the real exhibit: a rambling Moroccan-style palace accumulated over two centuries of diplomatic use, with rooms opening onto each other unexpectedly and a rooftop terrace that looks out over the medina to the port.
Paul Bowles lived in Tangier from 1947 until his death in 1999. He translated Moroccan oral literature, composed music, wrote novels and short stories, and became the city’s most persistent foreign chronicler. His apartment in the Immeuble Itesa in the ville nouvelle is no longer open to visitors, but his presence is still felt in the city — in the cultural conversations at the Legation, in the work of Moroccan writers he encouraged and translated, in the particular quality of melancholy and strangeness that runs through the best writing about Tangier.
Cap Spartel and the Caves of Hercules
Twelve kilometres west of the city, the headland of Cap Spartel marks the point where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean — or, more precisely, where the two bodies of water cease to be distinguishable from each other, though the currents and colours are different enough that on a clear day you can see where the darker Atlantic water meets the lighter Mediterranean. The lighthouse, built in 1864 and depicted on the Moroccan two-hundred dirham note, stands on the promontory above dramatic cliffs.
Just below Cap Spartel are the Caves of Hercules, a sea cave of considerable scale that has been used by humans since neolithic times and carries, as its name suggests, a long accretion of mythology. The cave’s seaward opening, worn by the Atlantic into the approximate shape of the African continent, has become the defining image of the place — uncanny enough that you suspect it has been assisted, though the geology argues otherwise. The cave is genuinely impressive: deep, cool, lit by shafts of light from the sea entrance, with the sound of the Atlantic audible throughout.
The drive out to Cap Spartel along the coastal road, through the forest of eucalyptus and pine that covers the headland, is one of the most pleasant short excursions from any Moroccan city. Go in the late afternoon, watch the light on the strait from the lighthouse promontory, and return to Tangier for dinner.
Café Hafa and the Art of Sitting Still
If you go nowhere else in Tangier, go to Café Hafa. Established in 1921 on a clifftop overlooking the strait, it is built on a series of terraces descending the cliff face, each level a few steps lower than the last, all of them shaded by old fig trees and looking out across the water to the Spanish coast. The Rolling Stones came here. So did the Beatles. So, more relevantly, did Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and almost every writer or musician who spent time in the city.
The menu is extremely simple: mint tea, coffee, soft drinks. The furniture is basic. The atmosphere is irreplaceable. There are few places in the world where the combination of a glass of tea, a view, a sea breeze and the knowledge that you are sitting in a place with genuine history produces the particular quality of contentment that Café Hafa manages. Order your tea. Sit. Watch the ferries crossing the strait below you. Do not be in a hurry.
A Honest Assessment
Tangier is not a city without problems. The pressure on arrivals at the ferry port — from unofficial guides, from taxi drivers who want to take you anywhere but where you asked — has eased considerably in recent years but has not disappeared. The medina, for all its charm, contains a degree of commercial aggression that some visitors find exhausting. The transformation of the waterfront has brought a bland modernity to the seafront that contrasts awkwardly with the ancient city behind it.
None of this outweighs what the city offers: a history of extraordinary richness, a position of unique geographical drama, a medina and kasbah of genuine quality, and an atmosphere — cosmopolitan, slightly anarchic, layered with literary and artistic association — that is unlike anywhere else in Morocco and, indeed, anywhere else I have visited.
Give it two full days. Arrive by ferry if you can; the approach from the sea, with the city climbing the hillside above the port, is the best introduction.
The ferry crossing also allows you to consciously feel the transition from Europe to North Africa, from the Christian world to the Islamic World, from the modern world to somewhere altogether more traditional.
Practical: The fast ferry from Tarifa in Spain takes 35 minutes and runs multiple times daily. It arrives at the main Tangier port, which is in walking distance of the medina. The newer Tanger-Med port, 40 kilometres east, handles most cargo and some passenger ferries — make sure you book to the correct port.