CITY SCENE
Long overshadowed by Marrakech, this distinct North African city has shed its louche Beat-era reputation and is emerging as Morocco’s next must-see destination.
The joys of exploring Tangier.
Located at the very northwestern tip of Africa, Tangier is a crossroads, a meeting point of two seas and two continents. Morocco’s oldest and most international city has long attracted great powers—the Romans, Arabs, Portuguese, and English all once ruled—but also travelers; its lengthy list of notable visitors range from Samuel Pepys, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton to the Rolling Stones and a generation of Beat poets. Paul Bowles loved it so much he settled here, and Yves Saint Laurent bought a cliff-side villa where he recharged between couture shows.
In recent decades, Marrakech has dominated Moroccan tourism. But that is changing. Last year, Tangier experienced a massive jump in visitors, with overnight stays up a staggering 60 percent for the first four months of 2017. Arrivals at the city’s Ibn Battuta Airport topped one million for the first time ever. The sudden increase was not the fruits of a slick advertising campaign. Rather, Tangier has undergone significant improvements in recent years that have allowed it to emerge from Marrakech’s long shadow.
While lacking the easy exoticism of its southern rival—the saturated pinks and ocher colors, desert sunshine, and air rich in both decadency and spices—Tangier has retained its distinctive charm. To get your bearings, head up to the Kasbah, the walled residential citadel that crowns the ancient Tangier medina. From the high rooftop terrace of hôtel de charme La Maison Blanche, the medina’s jumble of flat white roofs spills steeply down toward the Bay of Tangier, a wide arcing expanse trimmed with golden sand. Radiating outward from the old town is the grid of the European-built Ville Nouvelle, which began to take shape at the beginning of the 20th century. To the north, across the Strait of Gibraltar, is Spain, just 14 kilometers away.
Tangier is known as the White City. Yet deep blues are everywhere: the sky, the sea, walls in the Kasbah, patio doors in courtyards, patterns on hand-painted tiles, women’s satiny robes hanging in the souk. “Blue, white, cream-tinted, but chiefly blue,” the Scottish author Sir John Foster Fraser wrote in 1911. It is Tangier’s signature color, and it overwhelms the city.
The king of Morocco summers in Tangier, a factor behind the recent developments and general sprucing up of the city. There is a new port and marina and a wide, six-kilometer-long corniche that runs along the length of the bay. And while new restaurants and hotels have sprung up, Tangier’s heritage hasn’t been neglected. Craftsmen have been steadily refurbishing masonry that dates back to the ninth century, and whitewashed walls gleam.
In the dozen years that I have been visiting the place, Tangier has never looked better, nor felt as cosmopolitan. From 1923 until Moroccan independence in 1956, it was officially an “international zone” administered by a consortium of foreign powers. Today, drawn to the city’s creative energy, a new generation of foreigners are settling and opening businesses. Significantly, too, many Moroccans who immigrated to France and Spain are returning home, injecting new money and spirit into the city.
There has long been a frizzy dynamism about Tangier, a uniqueness that comes from its disparate blend of cultures. Read on to discover a half-dozen ways to explore it.