Drought-hit Morocco closes public baths 3 days per week
RABAT, Morocco — For years, Fatima Mhattar has welcomed shopkeepers, students, bankers and retirees to Hammam El Majd, a public bath on the outskirts of Morocco’s capital, Rabat. For a handful of change they relax in a haze of steam, then are scrubbed down and rinsed off alongside their friends and neighbors.
The public baths — hammams in Arabic — for centuries have been fixtures of Moroccan life. Inside their domed chambers, men and women, regardless of social class, commune together and unwind. Bathers sit on stone slabs under mosaic tiles, lather with traditional black soap and wash with scalding water from plastic buckets.
But they’ve become the latest casualty as Morocco faces unprecedented threats from climate change and a six-year drought that officials have called disastrous. Cities throughout the North African nation have mandated that hammams close three days a week this year to save water.
Mhattar smiled as she greeted families on a recent Sunday lugging buckets of towels, sandals and other bath supplies to the hammam where she works as a receptionist. But she worried about how restrictions would limit customer volume and cut into her pay.
“Even when it’s open Thursday to Sunday, most of the clients avoid coming because they are afraid it’s full of people,” Mhattar said.
Little rainfall and higher temperatures have shrunk Morocco’s largest reservoirs, frightening farmers and municipalities that rely on their water. The country is making painful choices while reckoning with climate change and drought.
The decision to place restrictions on businesses including hammams and car washes has angered some. A chorus of hammam-goers and politicians are suggesting that the government is picking winners and losers by choosing not to ration water at more upmarket hotels, pools, spas or in the agricultural sector, which consumes the majority of Morocco’s water.
“This measure does not seem to be of great benefit, especially since the (hammam) sector is not considered one of the sectors that consumes the most water,” Fatima Zahra Bata, a member of Morocco’s House of Representatives, noted to Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit in written questions last month.
Bata asked why officials in many municipalities had carved out exceptions for spas, which are typically used by wealthier people and tourists. She warned that hammam closures would “increase the fragility and suffering of this class, whose monthly income does not exceed 2,000 or 3,000 dirhams at best.” Hammam workers make an amount equivalent to $200 to $300.
The closings affect the 200,000 or so people who are directly or indirectly employed in the hammam sector, which accounts for about 2% of the country’s total water consumption, according to Morocco’s national statistics agency.
Hammams have been closed in cities including Casablanca, Tangier and Beni Mellal since the interior minister asked local officials to enact watersaving measures this year. The closings have raised particular concern in towns high in the Atlas Mountains, where people go to hammams to warm up.
Mustapha Baradine, a carpenter in Rabat, likes to enjoy hammams with his family weekly and doesn’t understand how the modest amount of water he uses is consequential in a drought. For him, the closings have fostered resentment and raised questions about wealth, poverty and political power.
“I did not like this decision at all. It would be better if they would empty their pools,” he said of local officials.
Morocco has reduced the prevalence of poverty in recent years, but income inequality continues to plague rural and urban areas. Despite rapid economic development in certain sectors, protests have historically arisen among working-class people over disparities and the rising cost of living.