Tangier, the First City of Morocco

Tangier sits at the north-western tip of Morocco, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic and Africa comes within sight of Europe. It is the first city most overland travellers touch after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, and it has spent its entire long history as exactly that: a port of entry, a place where continents and cultures are handed back and forth.

The city rewards a traveller who treats it as a doorway rather than a quick stop. Tangier is neither wholly Mediterranean nor wholly Moroccan; it carries the layered memory of Phoenicians, Romans, Portuguese, the British, the Spanish and a famous mid-twentieth-century international era. Understanding that layering turns a brief arrival into a genuine first chapter of Morocco.

Three thousand years of crossings

Tangier is one of the oldest cities in Morocco, founded by Phoenician traders and later an important Roman town known as Tingis — the name from which the surrounding region of Tingitana took its title. Its position on the strait made it perpetually desirable, and over the centuries it passed through Portuguese, Spanish and English hands, each leaving a mark on its streets and its character.

From 1923 until Moroccan independence in 1956, Tangier was governed as an International Zone, administered jointly by several foreign powers and a magnet for writers, painters, diplomats and adventurers. That cosmopolitan, slightly raffish reputation lingers in the city's self-image, even as modern Tangier has reinvented itself around a vast new port and a fast rail link to the south.

The medina and the kasbah

Tangier's old city is compact and walkable, climbing a hillside above the port in a tangle of whitewashed lanes. At its lower edge is the Petit Socco, a small café-lined square that was the social heart of the international era; from there the streets rise toward the kasbah, the old fortified citadel at the top of the hill.

Within the kasbah, the former sultan's palace, the Dar el Makhzen, now houses a museum of Moroccan arts and antiquities and is worth an unhurried hour. The real pleasure, though, is simply the climb: the lanes open without warning onto terraces and gateways with the strait spread out below, and on a clear day the Spanish coast is a thin line on the horizon.

Where two seas meet

Tangier's setting is genuinely unusual. The city looks out over the point where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea come together, and the long curving beach below the medina faces a bay busy with ferries and fishing boats. The seafront promenade is a favourite evening walk for Tangier's own residents, and joining them is a good way to feel the city's rhythm.

A short drive west of the city, the land runs out at Cape Spartel, where a nineteenth-century lighthouse marks the north-western corner of continental Africa. Nearby, the sea has cut the Caves of Hercules into the cliffs, their seaward opening shaped, by happy accident, something like a map of Africa. Both make a natural half-day excursion from the city.

A city of writers and exiles

Few cities of its size have drawn so many writers. In the years around its international period and after, Tangier was home or host to Paul and Jane Bowles, the Beat writers, and a long roll of European and American artists, alongside Moroccan novelists for whom the city was equally a subject. The Gran Café de Paris and the Librairie des Colonnes still trade on that literary memory, and they are pleasant places to pause.

It would be a mistake, though, to see Tangier only through foreign eyes. It is a working Moroccan city with its own deep culture, and the most rewarding way to spend a morning is in the medina's markets and food stalls, where the city's everyday life — not its legend — is on show.

Tangier as the gateway on The Long Way East

On The Long Way East, Tangier is the point of arrival in Africa — the city the journey reaches after Madrid, Andalusia and the sea crossing from Tarifa. We give it time on purpose. To step straight from the ferry to a fast train south would be to miss the very place that has made these crossings for three thousand years.

Tangier also frames what follows. The Andalusian cities the journey has just left were shaped by the same Moorish civilisation visible here in the medina's architecture and craft. From Tangier the route turns inland and south, gathering pace toward Marrakech and the High Atlas — but it is in this white city on the strait that Morocco first properly begins.