Before it was Arab, before it was Muslim, Morocco was Amazigh land. The Amazigh, a name that translates as "free people" and that Greco-Roman tradition twisted into "Berbers" (from the Greek bárbaros), have lived in North Africa for at least five or six thousand years. Organised into tribes and confederations, living from herding, mountain farming and caravan trade, they developed their own language, Tamazight, with its ancient alphabet, Tifinagh, and a strong culture of tribal autonomy that no foreign power ever managed to erase completely.
From the start of the first millennium BC, the Moroccan coast came into the orbit of the great Mediterranean seafarers. The Phoenicians, merchants from present-day Lebanon, founded trading posts along the Atlantic and Mediterranean shores: Lixus (near today's Larache), Tingis (Tangier) and, according to tradition, a post on the island of Mogador, off Essaouira, where they produced purple dye, the most expensive colour of the ancient world. After the fall of Carthage, their heir, these colonies passed into the Punic-Carthaginian sphere and then to Rome.
That encounter between the Amazigh world of the interior and the Mediterranean traders of the coast set the mould for all of Morocco's later history: a country with two faces, one made of plains and cities open to the sea and to outside influences, the other of the Atlas and Rif mountains, the refuge of the tribes that kept the Berber language and customs alive. Even today, between a quarter and half of Moroccans speak some form of Tamazight, and since the 2011 Constitution it has been an official language of the kingdom alongside Arabic.
Around the turn of the era, the north of present-day Morocco formed the kingdom of Mauretania, ruled by Amazigh dynasties allied with Rome. Its most brilliant figure was Juba II, a North African prince raised in Rome and husband of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra of Egypt and Mark Antony, whom the emperor Augustus placed on the throne of Mauretania around 25 BC. Juba II was a scholar king, a geographer and a patron of the arts who made Volubilis one of the capitals of his kingdom and filled his cities with Hellenistic art, keeping his throne in exchange for recognising Rome's sovereignty.
When his son Ptolemy was executed on the orders of the emperor Caligula around AD 40, a revolt led by Aedemon broke out. Once the rebellion was crushed, Rome annexed the kingdom and organised it as a province called Mauretania Tingitana, meaning "of Tingis", today's Tangier, which was its capital. The province covered northern Morocco, from the Strait down to the cities of Sala (next to Rabat) and Volubilis, and was tied administratively more to the Hispanic world than to the African one.
Volubilis, on a fertile plain of olive groves near today's Meknes, was the main inland city: it was granted the rank of Roman municipality and filled up with a forum, basilica, triumphal arch, baths and grand houses with splendid mosaics you can still see. Rome exploited the region for its wheat, its olive oil and its wild animals for the circus. Around the year 285, the emperor Diocletian pulled the frontier back and abandoned Volubilis and much of the interior, though the city stayed inhabited for centuries by Latin, Christian, Jewish and Berber communities. Its ruins, now a World Heritage Site, are the most eloquent evidence of Morocco's ancient past.
In the 7th century, the great expansion of Islam out of Arabia reached the Maghreb. Between 680 and 710, after hard campaigns against Berber resistance, embodied by legendary figures such as the chieftain Kusayla and the warrior queen Kahina, the Arab armies brought North Africa into the Umayyad Caliphate. The Amazigh tribes converted to Islam quickly and en masse, and in 711 a largely Berber army led by Táriq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait from Morocco and began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula: the name Gibraltar comes from Jabal Táriq, "Táriq's mountain".
Morocco, however, had no wish to be a mere province of a distant caliphate. In 788, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad named Idris ibn Abdallah, who had fled the East after a failed revolt against the Abbasids, was taken in by the Berber tribes of the Volubilis region and proclaimed imam. He thus founded the Idrisid dynasty, considered the first truly Moroccan dynasty, which for the first time joined Islam to a local political power independent of Baghdad. Idris I was poisoned by his enemies, but his posthumous son, Idris II, consolidated the kingdom.
The great legacy of the Idrisids was the city of Fez. Idris I laid out a first settlement around 789, and his son Idris II refounded it in 809 as his capital, drawing waves of refugees: Arab families from Kairouan (in Tunisia) and, above all, Andalusians expelled from Córdoba, who gave their name to the Andalusian quarter. In 859, a devout woman from Kairouan, Fatima al-Fihri, funded the building of the mosque and university of al-Qarawiyyin, recognised by UNESCO as the oldest continuously operating institution of higher learning in the world. Fez was born as the spiritual and intellectual capital of western Islam.
Around the middle of the 11th century, a new force rose from the heart of the desert. The Almoravids (al-murabitun, "the people of the ribat", the fortress-monastery) were nomadic Berbers of the Sanhaja confederation, from the far reaches of the western Sahara in present-day Mauritania. Driven by the preaching of a strict form of Islam, they set out on conquest under the leadership of Yusuf ibn Tashfin and within a few decades united all of Morocco and much of northwest Africa for the first time.
Around 1070, the Almoravids founded a new capital on the plain at the foot of the High Atlas: Marrakech, the city that would end up giving its name to the whole country ("Morocco" comes from "Marrakech"). From there they ruled an empire stretching from the Senegal River to the Ebro. In 1086, called in by the Andalusian taifa kings who were being squeezed by the Christians, they crossed the Strait and defeated Alfonso VI of Castile at the Battle of Sagrajas (Zallaqa), near Badajoz. Shortly afterwards they annexed al-Andalus, uniting the south of the peninsula and the Maghreb under a single crown.
The Almoravids brought the refined Andalusian civilisation to Morocco: architecture, craftsmen, poets and scholars. They built mosques and irrigation systems, including the underground khettaras that still water the palm groves of Marrakech, and minted a gold coin prized all over Europe. Their religious rigour, on the other hand, set them against philosophers and mystics and cost them support. In the early 12th century, a new reformist movement born in the Atlas Mountains, the Almohads, finally brought them down: in 1147 the Almohads took Marrakech, and with it the empire.
The Almohads (al-muwahhidun, "those who proclaim the oneness of God") were perhaps the most powerful empire ever to rule Morocco. They grew out of the preaching of Ibn Tumart, a Berber reformer from the High Atlas who proclaimed himself the mahdi (a guide sent by God) and denounced the laxity of the Almoravids. His disciple Abd al-Mumin turned the movement into a military power that between 1130 and 1160 conquered not just Morocco but the entire Maghreb as far as Libya, plus southern al-Andalus, forging the largest empire ever centred on Morocco.
Under the Almohad sultans, above all Yusuf and his son Yaqub al-Mansur ("the victorious"), Morocco lived its golden age. Al-Mansur defeated the Christian kings at the Battle of Alarcos (1195) and sponsored some of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages, such as the Córdoba-born philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and the physician and philosopher Maimonides. The Almohads adorned their capitals with sober, grand architecture: in Marrakech they built the Koutoubia Mosque, whose minaret is a twin of the Giralda in Seville and the Hassan Tower in Rabat, all three the work of the same dynasty and in the same style.
The empire began to crack in 1212, when a coalition of Christian kings crushed the Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, in the south of present-day Spain. It was the beginning of the end of Muslim power on the peninsula: over the 13th century, al-Andalus shrank to the Kingdom of Granada, and the Almohad empire fell apart in the Maghreb, split among rival dynasties. In Morocco, the Marinids took over.
From the mid-13th century, the Marinid dynasty (or Banu Marin) took power in Morocco. Unlike the Almoravids and Almohads, the Marinids brought no new religious doctrine: they were nomadic Berbers of the Zenata confederation who took over the country tribe by tribe until they seized Marrakech in 1269 and ended the Almohad empire. Their rule, which lasted into the 15th century, coincided with the final retreat of Islam from the Iberian Peninsula, despite their attempts to help Granada by crossing the Strait.
The Marinids moved the centre of power from Marrakech to Fez, which enjoyed its most brilliant period under them. Next to the old Idrisid city they built a new administrative capital, Fez el-Jdid ("New Fez"), with palaces, gardens and the Jewish quarter, the mellah, one of the oldest in Morocco. Above all, they made Fez a capital of learning: they built some of the most beautiful madrasas (residential Quranic schools) in the Islamic world, such as the Bou Inania and the Al-Attarin, gems of carved stucco, sculpted cedar and tilework (zellij) that still dazzle visitors today.
Under the Marinids, Fez was one of the great intellectual centres of the Mediterranean, with a university, al-Qarawiyyin, that drew students from across the Muslim world. Among those who passed through were the great traveller from Tangier, Ibn Battuta, and later the geographer Leo Africanus. The medieval city that took shape then, the medina of Fez el-Bali, the largest and best preserved in the Islamic world, is now a World Heritage Site and remains the spiritual and craft heart of the country. The decline of the Marinids, worn down by infighting, opened the way to the threat of a new enemy: the Portuguese and Castilians, who were starting to appear on Morocco's coasts.
At the end of the Middle Ages, the Iberian powers descended on Morocco's coasts. Portugal launched its overseas expansion by taking Ceuta in 1415 and went on to seize a chain of strongholds along the Atlantic and Mediterranean shores: Tangier, Asilah, Safi, Azemmour, Mazagan (today's El Jadida) and Santa Cruz do Cabo de Gué (Agadir). Spain, for its part, occupied Melilla in 1497 and other rocky outposts. Morocco, divided and weakened after the Marinids, seemed at the mercy of the Christians.
The response came from the south. In the Draa valley and the Souss region, the Saadian dynasty emerged: a Sharifian family, meaning it claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, which used the fervour of holy war against the invaders to unite the country. Over the 16th century, the Saadians won back strongholds from the Portuguese: in 1541 they took Agadir from Portugal, a blow that triggered the abandonment of almost all its positions. The high point came on 4 August 1578 at the Battle of Ksar el-Kebir (Alcácer Quibir), known as "the Battle of the Three Kings": the young King Sebastian I of Portugal invaded Morocco with a large army and was wiped out. All three main players died on the field (Sebastian himself, the reigning Saadian sultan and the claimant Sebastian was backing), and the defeat, which left Portugal with no king and no heir, led two years later to the country's annexation by the Spanish crown.
The real winner of Ksar el-Kebir was the new Saadian sultan, Ahmad al-Mansur ("the Victorious"), who used the huge ransoms paid for captive Portuguese nobles to fund a dazzling reign. In Marrakech he built the lavish El Badi Palace, covered in gold, marble and onyx, and in 1591 he sent an expedition across the Sahara that conquered the Songhai Empire and the city of Timbuktu, in present-day Mali, controlling the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade for a time. What remains of that splendour in Marrakech are the Saadian Tombs, a mausoleum of astonishingly rich decoration that stayed hidden and walled up for centuries.
After Ahmad al-Mansur's death, Saadian power collapsed into civil war. Out of the crisis, around the middle of the 17th century, came the dynasty that still reigns in Morocco: the Alaouites (or Filalis), another Sharifian family descended from the Prophet, originally from the Tafilalt oasis in the southeast, on the edge of the desert. Its founder, Moulay Rashid, reunited the country around 1666-1669, putting an end to the anarchy. But it was his successor who left an indelible mark.
Moulay Ismail, who reigned from 1672 to 1727, more than half a century, was one of the most powerful and feared rulers in Moroccan history, a contemporary and admiring rival of Louis XIV of France. With an iron hand he brought the tribes to heel, drove the English out of Tangier (1684) and the Spanish out of La Mamora and Larache, and created a standing army of Black slaves brought from the south, the famous Black Guard (the Abid al-Bukhari), which gave him unprecedented independence from the tribes. His reign was one of both order and legendary cruelty, remembered for the harshness of its punishments.
Moulay Ismail moved the capital to Meknes, which he turned into a "Moroccan Versailles": he ringed it with more than forty kilometres of walls and built palaces, mosques, enormous granaries, stables for thousands of horses and a large reservoir, the Agdal. The monumental Bab Mansour gate, finished under his son, is one of the most beautiful in the Islamic world. After his death the country fell back into succession struggles, but the Alaouite dynasty survived and, with ups and downs, has ruled Morocco to this day, making it one of the oldest reigning houses in the world.
Through the 18th century and much of the 19th, Morocco remained a sovereign state ruled by Alaouite sultans, in a world where nearly all the rest of North Africa was falling under Ottoman or European control. The trade policy of Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah (Mohammed III) stood out: in the late 18th century he opened the country to international trade, founded the port of Essaouira (Mogador) in 1764-1765 and, in 1777, became one of the first rulers in the world to recognise the independence of the newly born United States.
But European industrialisation upset the balance. Over the 19th century, France, which had conquered neighbouring Algeria in 1830, and Spain put more and more pressure on a militarily backward Morocco. The country suffered two humiliating defeats: in 1844, after backing the Algerian resistance, it was beaten by France at the Battle of Isly; and in 1859-1860, in the so-called War of Africa or War of Tetouan, Spain defeated Morocco, occupied Tetouan and imposed a heavy indemnity and the enlargement of its enclaves in the north.
The European powers then competed for influence over the sultanate. At the Madrid Conference (1880) and, above all, the Algeciras Conference (1906), the great powers (France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Germany) negotiated among themselves the future of a Morocco increasingly in debt and penetrated by foreign banks, loans and consuls. The Tangier crisis (1905) and the Agadir crisis (1911), in which Germany challenged French ambitions, nearly sparked a European war. The outcome was already written: within a few years, Moroccan independence, kept for more than a thousand years, would fade out under the protectorate system.
On 30 March 1912, Sultan Abd al-Hafid signed the Treaty of Fez, placing Morocco under a French protectorate. That same year, a Franco-Spanish agreement divided up the territory: France took the largest and richest part of the country, governed from Rabat, and Spain got two strips, the mountainous north with its capital at Tetouan and a zone in the far south near the Sahara. Because of its strategic value on the Strait, the city of Tangier was given special status as an international zone in 1923, run by a commission of several powers. Formally the sultan still reigned, but real power lay with the European residents-general; the first and most influential, the French marshal Lyautey, modernised infrastructure and built new towns next to the medinas, but in the service of colonial interests.
The occupation was not peaceful. The best-known resistance broke out in the Rif mountains, in the Spanish zone. There the Riffian leader Abd el-Krim (Mohammed ben Abd el-Karim al-Khattabi) led a revolt of the Berber tribes and, in July 1921, dealt the Spanish army one of the worst catastrophes in its history: the Disaster of Annual, where some thirteen thousand soldiers died. Abd el-Krim proclaimed a short-lived Republic of the Rif, with modern institutions, which held out for several years. Only a massive Franco-Spanish coalition, which made widespread use of chemical weapons (mustard gas, now condemned) against the Riffian population, managed to crush the resistance; Abd el-Krim surrendered in 1926. His struggle would go on to inspire anti-colonial movements around the world.
Under the protectorate, Morocco was transformed: railways and roads were laid, Casablanca grew into a great metropolis, phosphates were mined and European settlers moved in and took the best land. But most Moroccans were left out of that modernisation, and a nationalist movement grew in the cities, organised in the 1930s and 1940s around parties such as Istiqlal ("Independence"), which in 1944 formally demanded an end to the protectorate.
The figure who embodied the struggle for independence was Sultan Mohammed V, who backed the nationalist movement. In 1953 the French authorities deposed him and sent him into exile, first to Corsica and then to Madagascar. The move set off a wave of protests and attacks that made the protectorate ungovernable, and France ended up giving way: Mohammed V made a triumphant return in 1955 and, on 2 March 1956, Morocco regained its independence from France; on 7 April, Spain handed back its northern protectorate. Tangier was reintegrated that same year and, over the following years and decades, Morocco recovered other territories (Ifni in 1969, the southern zone), although Spain kept the cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Mohammed V took the title of king.
On his death in 1961 he was succeeded by his son Hassan II, who reigned with a firm hand for almost forty years. His reign consolidated the monarchy and brought a degree of openness, but it was also marked by the so-called "Years of Lead": a period of political repression, with arrests, disappearances and secret prisons for opponents, especially after two military coup attempts against the king in 1971 and 1972. In 1975, as Spain withdrew from Western Sahara —its last colony—, Hassan II organised the Green March: some 350,000 Moroccan civilians peacefully crossed the border to claim the territory. Spain ceded it to Morocco and Mauritania through the Madrid Accords, but the Sahrawi independence movement, the Polisario Front, proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and fought a long war, until the UN-sponsored ceasefire of 1991. The final status of Western Sahara remains unresolved: Morocco administers and claims most of the territory and proposes autonomy under its sovereignty, while the Polisario Front calls for a self-determination referendum; the United Nations still considers it a territory awaiting decolonisation, and it is a sensitive issue on which positions are sharply opposed.
In 1999 Hassan II was succeeded by his son Mohammed VI, the current king. His reign opened a period of reform: a new family code (the 2004 Mudawana) that expanded women's rights, an Equity and Reconciliation Commission that investigated the abuses of the Years of Lead, and an economic opening that has driven major projects —ports, renewable energy, Africa's first high-speed train—. In 2011, against the backdrop of the so-called Arab Spring, a protest movement (the 20 February Movement) led to a constitutional reform that expanded Parliament's powers and recognised Tamazight as an official language, although the king kept his essential powers. Today Morocco faces the challenges of social inequality, youth unemployment and development, with its gaze turned at once towards Africa, Europe and the Arab world.
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Casablanca, Morocco's largest city, is also one of the youngest in its present form. On its site there stood, from the Middle Ages, a modest Berber port called Anfa, which became a nest of corsairs; that is why the Portuguese razed it in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 18th century the Alaouite sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah rebuilt the city and gave it the Arabic name Dar el-Beida, "the white house", which Spanish merchants translated as Casablanca.
The great leap came with the protectorate. From 1912 the French chose Casablanca as the country's main port and economic centre. Within a few decades the city grew at a dizzying pace, from a few thousand inhabitants to a metropolis of more than a million. French urban planners gave it wide boulevards and a remarkable ensemble of Art Deco and neo-Moorish ("mauresque") architecture, which still stamps its character on the centre today and makes it an open-air museum of interwar architecture.
Casablanca was the stage for historic moments: in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Roosevelt and Churchill met here at the famous Casablanca Conference, where they agreed to demand the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. The city was fixed forever in the world's imagination by the 1942 film of the same name, even though it was shot entirely in Hollywood studios. Today Casablanca is the country's economic and financial heart, crowned by the gigantic Hassan II Mosque, inaugurated in 1993, with one of the tallest minarets in the world and partly built over the sea.
Rabat, the capital of Morocco, carries its origin in its name: it comes from ribat, the fortress-monastery where warriors of the faith prepared for jihad. Its history goes back even further: next to the city, at the mouth of the Bou Regreg river, lie the ruins of Chellah, on the site of the ancient Roman Sala, which centuries later became a Marinid royal necropolis, with walls, a ruined mosque and gardens now inhabited by storks.
The great push came in the 12th century, when the Almohad sultan Yaqub al-Mansur set out to make Rabat an imperial capital. He built a vast wall, the monumental Oudaya gate (Bab er-Rouah) and began work on what was meant to be one of the largest mosques in the world, of which only the minaret ever rose: the Hassan Tower, the unfinished twin of the Koutoubia and the Giralda, which still dominates the city beside the modern Mausoleum of Mohammed V. On his death the project was abandoned and Rabat languished for centuries.
Its revival came in the modern era. In the 17th century numerous Moriscos expelled from Spain settled here and in neighbouring Salé, founding the belligerent corsair Republic of Salé, feared for its pirate raids all over the Atlantic. And in 1912 the French resident-general Lyautey moved the country's administrative capital from Fez to Rabat, which has remained the capital ever since. Its old town, the Kasbah of the Udayas and its modern colonial heritage were declared a World Heritage Site in 2012, as an example of the meeting between Arab-Muslim tradition and 20th-century urban planning.
Meknes owes its grandeur to one man: Sultan Moulay Ismail, who reigned from 1672 to 1727 and chose it as the capital of his empire. Founded centuries earlier by a Berber tribe, the Miknasa, from whom it takes its name, Meknes had been a secondary town until Moulay Ismail decided to turn it into the showcase of his power, a palace city comparable in ambition to the Versailles that his contemporary and rival Louis XIV of France was building in those very years.
With the labour of thousands of workers and captives, Moulay Ismail surrounded Meknes with a triple ring of walls more than forty kilometres long, dotted with monumental gates, and built within them an imperial city of his own: palaces, mosques, gardens, barracks for his Black Guard, gigantic granaries and stables able to house thousands of horses, and an enormous reservoir, the Agdal, for irrigation and water supply. The jewel of the ensemble is the Bab Mansour gate, completed under his son and considered one of the most beautiful monumental gates in North Africa, with its exquisite decoration of tilework and marble salvaged from Volubilis.
After Moulay Ismail's death the court moved again and Meknes lost its role as capital, but it kept its extraordinary monumental legacy. The sultan rests in the Mausoleum of Moulay Ismail, one of the few shrines in Morocco open to non-Muslim visitors. The imperial city of Meknes has been a World Heritage Site since 1996, a testament to the height of 17th-century Alaouite Morocco and to the excess of one of its most powerful rulers.
Fez is the historic soul of Morocco. It was founded by the Idrisids at the end of the 8th century and the beginning of the 9th —Idris I laid out a first settlement around 789 and his son Idris II refounded it in 809— and from the start it was a melting pot of cultures: it took in thousands of Arab families from Kairouan and Andalusi refugees from Córdoba, who settled the two banks of the river respectively and gave their names to the Kairouyine and Andalusian quarters. In 859 the mosque and university of al-Qarawiyyin was born there, founded by Fatima al-Fihri and recognised as the oldest continuously operating institution of higher learning in the world.
Under the Marinids, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Fez reached its peak. It became the capital of the kingdom and one of the great intellectual centres of Islam, with its exquisitely decorated madrasas —the Bou Inania, the Al-Attarin—, its libraries and its university, through which scholars from all over the Mediterranean passed. Beside the old Idrisid city they built Fez el-Jdid, with the royal palace and the mellah, the Jewish quarter. The medina of Fez el-Bali, with its thousands of alleys where cars cannot go, its fondouks, its mosques and its tanneries (the famous Chouara tanneries, where leather is still dyed as it was centuries ago), is the largest car-free urban area in the world and the best-preserved medieval medina on the planet.
Although it lost its political status as capital, first to Marrakesh and Meknes and finally to Rabat in 1912, Fez always kept its prestige as Morocco's religious, cultural and craft capital. It produced dynasties of scholars, theologians and merchants, and its university trained the country's elites for more than a thousand years. The medina of Fez was among the first places in Morocco to be inscribed as a World Heritage Site, in 1981, and it remains the spiritual heart of the nation.
A few kilometres from Meknes, on a plain of olive groves at the foot of Mount Zerhoun, stand the ruins of Volubilis, the most complete record of Roman antiquity in Morocco. The site was inhabited from prehistoric times and was a Berber and Mauretanian settlement before King Juba II made it, around the turn of the era, one of the capitals of his kingdom of Mauretania, an ally of Rome.
After the Roman annexation, around AD 44, Volubilis was granted the rank of municipium and prospered as the main inland city of the province of Mauretania Tingitana, made rich by the trade in olive oil, wheat and wild animals for the empire's circuses. At its height it may have had some twenty thousand inhabitants. From that golden age remain its forum, the basilica, the capitol, the triumphal arch of Caracalla and, above all, the great mansions with splendid mosaics (the Labours of Hercules, Orpheus, Bacchus) that are still preserved where they were laid, in the open air.
When Rome pulled its frontier back around the year 285, Volubilis was not entirely abandoned: for centuries it remained home to Latin Christian, Jewish and Berber communities. Tradition has it that it was here, in neighbouring Walili, that Idris I took refuge before founding Fez, so the city links Roman antiquity with the birth of Islamic Morocco. The earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755 brought down much of what was still standing, and its marble was plundered to build Meknes. Today, listed as a World Heritage Site in 1997, Volubilis is the most important and best-preserved Roman site in the country.
Marrakesh is an imperial city born of the desert and of faith. It was founded around 1070 by the Almoravids, Berber warriors from the Sahara, as the capital of their empire and a base for controlling the caravan routes that came up from the south laden with gold, salt and slaves. The whole country took its name from it: "Morocco" is nothing more than the European corruption of "Marrakesh". The Almoravids gave it walls of red earth —the colour behind its nickname, the "Red City"— and khettaras, underground channels that brought water from the Atlas to irrigate the vast palm groves.
In 1147 it was conquered by the Almohads, who made it their capital and adorned it with their most famous work: the Koutoubia Mosque, whose minaret of almost seventy metres, a sibling of the Giralda in Seville, still dominates the city and is its symbol. Under the Almohads, Marrakesh was one of the largest cities in the Islamic world, the seat of power of an empire stretching from Spain to Tunisia. Later, under the Marinids, power moved to Fez and Marrakesh lost its leading role, but never its prestige.
In the 16th century it regained its splendour under the Saadians, who made it the capital once more and filled it with monuments. The heart of the city is still its medina, now a World Heritage Site, a maze of souks, mosques, riads and craft workshops arranged around Jemaa el-Fna square, a unique space where for centuries storytellers, snake charmers, Gnawa musicians, water sellers and food stalls have gathered. UNESCO proclaimed it a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, in recognition of a living tradition of street theatre that dates back to medieval Morocco.
The Saadian 16th century left Marrakesh some of its most admired treasures. Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, enriched by the ransom of the Portuguese nobles captured at Alcazarquivir and by the gold of Timbuktu, built the El Badi Palace ("the Incomparable"), clad in Italian marble and Sudanese gold, of which only the imposing ruins remain today. From that dynasty the Saadian Tombs survive intact, a royal mausoleum of astonishing filigree in stucco, marble and cedar that a later Alaouite sultan, Moulay Ismail, had walled up; they remained hidden and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1917.
Later, under the Alaouites and during the protectorate, the city was enriched with palaces such as the Bahia, residence of a 19th-century grand vizier, and with gardens that became famous the world over. The best known is the Jardin Majorelle, created in the 1920s and 1930s by the French painter Jacques Majorelle, with its intense cobalt blue —"Majorelle blue"—, and rescued decades later by the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who restored it and whose ashes rest there.
That blend of historic splendour and southern light turned Marrakesh, from the mid-20th century onwards, into a magnet for artists, writers and travellers: from Winston Churchill, who painted it, to the musicians and filmmakers who chose it as a refuge. Today it is Morocco's great tourist centre, a place where restored riads, luxury hotels and galleries sit side by side with age-old souks, tanners and the everyday life of the medina, in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas.
On the Atlantic coast, buffeted by the trade winds, Essaouira is one of the Moroccan cities with the most singular history. In its bay the Phoenicians were already producing purple dye on the Purpuraria Islands, and in the 16th century the Portuguese built a fortress they called Mogador, one of their strongholds on the coast. But the city as it looks today was born in 1764-1765, when the Alaouite sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah decided to create a great royal port to channel trade with Europe and commissioned European architects to lay it out, designing it on a regular plan with solid bastioned walls.
The sultan wanted to make Essaouira the great hub of Morocco's foreign trade, and to do so he attracted Jewish merchants, granting them privileges: they came to make up nearly half the population, and some families, the "king's merchants", handled the flow of goods with Europe and the interior of Africa. For more than a century Essaouira was the country's main Atlantic port, a cosmopolitan place where Muslims, Jews and European consuls lived side by side, with its mellah, its synagogues and its bustling trade in gum arabic, sugar, ivory and ostriches.
Commercial decline came with the rise of Agadir and Casablanca, but Essaouira kept its charm as a city frozen in time. In the 20th century it became a haven for artists and musicians —Jimi Hendrix himself passed through, feeding all sorts of legends— and the birthplace of the Gnawa music festival, the tradition of the descendants of sub-Saharan slaves. Its walled medina, a superb example of an 18th-century fortified town built on a European plan in North Africa, has been a World Heritage Site since 2001.
In the Atlantic south, where the plains of the Souss open onto the ocean, Agadir has a history of fortifications, trade and catastrophe. At the beginning of the 16th century the Portuguese built a stronghold here, Santa Cruz do Cabo de Gué, part of their chain of positions on the Moroccan coast. But in 1541 the Saadians, in the midst of their offensive to drive out the Christians, took it from them: the fall of Agadir was such a heavy blow for Portugal that it hastened the abandonment of almost all its other Atlantic strongholds in the country.
Under the sultans Agadir was an active port, though its fortunes rose and fell with the interests of those in power: in the 18th century Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah closed it to favour his new Essaouira. In 1911 the city made front-page news around the world with the "Agadir Crisis", when the dispatch of a German gunboat to its bay, to challenge French expansion, nearly triggered a European war, three years before the First World War.
The date that defined Agadir, however, was 29 February 1960. That night a violent earthquake flattened the city in barely fifteen seconds and killed some 12,000 to 15,000 people, almost a third of its population. It was one of the greatest tragedies in Morocco's modern history. King Mohammed V decided to rebuild the entire city a few kilometres further south, with earthquake-resistant standards and a modern layout. That is why Agadir is today a new city, with no old medina, devoted to beach-and-sun tourism: the country's great seaside resort, with long golden sands and a mild climate all year round, built over the ruins of a much older history.
Morocco's Atlantic coast, from Essaouira to Agadir, has always been a frontier of encounters. The caravan routes coming up from sub-Saharan Africa ended here, and with them, along with gold and salt, came enslaved men and women brought from south of the Sahara. Their descendants gave rise to one of Morocco's most original cultural expressions: the Gnawa, mystical-musical brotherhoods that fused Sufi Islam with rhythms, instruments and trance rituals of sub-Saharan origin. Their music, with the hypnotic bass of the guembri and the metallic clatter of the qraqeb castanets, has become an emblem of Morocco and a magnet for musicians from all over the world, especially at the Essaouira festival.
This region is also the land of the southern Amazigh, in particular the Chleuh or Shilha of the Souss and the Anti-Atlas, who speak their own variety of Tamazight, Tashelhit. Growers of argan and saffron and tenacious traders —many of the shopkeepers and grocers in Moroccan cities come from the Souss—, they keep their own traditions, poetry and music alive. Their lands are the source of argan oil, found only in south-western Morocco and now famous worldwide for its culinary and cosmetic uses.
The Atlantic coast thus brings together three worlds: that of the Atlas and the Berber peoples of the interior, that of the ports open to trade with Europe, and that of the African heritage that arrived across the desert. This blend —Berber, Arab, Andalusi, Jewish, sub-Saharan and European— is the hallmark of the whole of southern Morocco, and few places convey it as well as the squares and souks of this strip of the country stretched between the Atlas and the ocean.
Tangier keeps watch over the point where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic and where Africa almost touches Europe, barely fourteen kilometres from Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar. That position has shaped its entire history. Founded by the Phoenicians and called Tingis by the Romans, it was the capital of the province of Mauretania Tingitana. Everyone who wanted to join the two worlds passed through its strait: the Muslim armies that crossed in 711 to conquer Hispania set out from here, and Tangier was the home town of the greatest traveller of the Middle Ages, Ibn Battuta, who in the 14th century journeyed across half the known world.
Because of its strategic value, Tangier was coveted by every power. The Portuguese took it in 1471, it passed into Spanish hands and then, curiously, to the English, who received it in 1661 as part of the dowry of a Portuguese princess married to Charles II of England. The English fortified it but, harassed relentlessly by the troops of Sultan Moulay Ismail, they abandoned it and blew up its defences in 1684. Back under Moroccan rule, it gradually became the country's diplomatic city, home to the foreign legations.
That cosmopolitan character took shape in the 20th century. Because it mattered to all the powers, Tangier was assigned to neither France nor Spain; instead, in 1923, it was given its own statute as an international zone, governed by a commission of several countries. It was a unique period that made the city a place apart within Morocco, until it rejoined the kingdom at independence in 1956 (although full sovereignty was not completed until 1960).
Between 1923 and 1956, the Tangier International Zone was one of the most singular places in the world: a city with no owner, administered jointly by several powers, with a free currency, unregulated banking and a permissive atmosphere that drew all kinds of characters. During the Second World War, its status as neutral territory filled it with refugees fleeing Europe, diplomats, smugglers, traffickers and spies from every side, in a web of intrigue worthy of a novel.
That freedom, along with its low cost of living, turned Tangier, especially in the forties, fifties and sixties, into a magnet for avant-garde artists and writers. The American novelist Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, lived here for decades; the leading figures of the Beat Generation wrote and gathered here (William Burroughs, who wrote much of Naked Lunch in Tangier, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg), along with painters, musicians and eccentric aristocrats. The city earned a legend of bohemianism, tolerance and elegant decadence that is still part of its identity.
After rejoining Morocco in 1956, Tangier lost its special status and went through decades of relative neglect. But in the 21st century it has made a strong comeback: King Mohammed VI made it a priority, and the city gained a gigantic port, Tanger-Med, one of the largest in the Mediterranean and in Africa, along with industrial zones and connections that have turned it into one of the country's economic engines. The cosmopolitan city of writers and spies is today also a major logistics gateway between Europe and Africa, true to its age-old role as a bridge between two worlds.
Perched in the Rif mountains, Chefchaouen (or Chaouen) is one of the most beautiful and distinctive towns in Morocco, famous worldwide for its houses painted an intense indigo blue that climb up the hillside. But its colour, so photographed today, matters little next to its history: the town was born as a stronghold of resistance against Iberian expansion. It was founded in 1471 by Moulay Ali ben Rachid to halt the advance of the Portuguese, who held the towns along the coast.
Chefchaouen very soon became a refuge for those expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. After the fall of Granada in 1492 and the successive expulsions, waves of Andalusian Muslims and Sephardic Jews fleeing Spain arrived here, leaving their mark on the architecture of white houses with tiled roofs, patios and balconies (very similar to that of Andalusian villages), as well as on crafts, music and customs. For centuries the town remained almost closed to the outside world: it was a holy place, forbidden to Christians, and it is said that only a handful of Europeans managed to get in before the 20th century.
The famous blue of its walls has several explanations: some attribute it to Jewish tradition, which associates that shade with the sky and the divine; others link it to a practical purpose, keeping houses cool and driving away mosquitoes. Whatever its origin, it became widespread in the 20th century and is today the town's hallmark. Chefchaouen lay within the Spanish protectorate in the north, and that heritage can still be felt: quite a few of its older residents speak some Spanish. Surrounded by the Rif mountains, it remains a calm, luminous place, between Andalusian memory and the Berber landscape.
The Rif mountains, which stretch across the whole of northern Morocco, have always been the land of untamed Berber tribes, hard to reach and fiercely independent, who resisted sultans and colonisers alike. It was here, in the 1920s, that one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions of the era broke out, and one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of Spain in Morocco was written.
The leader of the rebellion was Abd el-Krim (Mohammed ben Abd el-Karim al-Khattabi), an educated Rifian, a former civil servant and journalist, who united the tribes against the occupation by the Spanish protectorate. In July 1921, at the Battle of Annual, his fighters inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Spanish army: some thirteen thousand soldiers died, including the commanding general, in what became known as the "Disaster of Annual", a national trauma that shook Spanish politics and contributed, years later, to the fall of the monarchy. On the strength of his victory, Abd el-Krim proclaimed the Republic of the Rif, a pioneering attempt at a modern state with its own institutions.
The Rifian resistance held out for several years, until France and Spain joined forces in a huge military deployment. To crush the population, both armies, above all the Spanish one, made massive use of chemical weapons, dropping mustard gas on the villages and markets of the Rif, an episode now documented and condemned for its cruelty towards civilians. Defeated, Abd el-Krim surrendered in 1926 and was sent into exile. His struggle, however, became a reference point for liberation movements across the colonial world, and the memory of that war is still alive in the identity, often a defiant one, of the Rif region.
Between 1912 and 1956, northern Morocco made up the bulk of the Spanish protectorate, with its capital in Tetouan. That period left a particular imprint that sets the region apart from the rest of the country. While most of Morocco came under French influence, the north and the Rif looked towards Spain for decades: the Spanish language spread, new districts with an Andalusian feel were built, along with squares, theatres and schools, and human and cultural ties remained that still endure, especially among the older generations, many of whom still speak Spanish.
Tetouan, the capital of that protectorate, is a city with a strong personality, whose medina, one of the best preserved and least altered in Morocco, was declared a World Heritage Site in 1997. Founded and resettled by Andalusians and Moriscos expelled from Spain, it keeps an urban layout, architecture, cuisine and crafts with clearly Andalusian roots, which earned it the nickname "the daughter of Granada". Together with towns such as Larache and Ksar el-Kebir, it forms a north with a very distinct identity.
This north also has its tensions. It is a mountainous, densely populated region, traditionally poorer and less attended to by the central government than the Casablanca-Rabat axis, which has fuelled a sense of grievance that at various times has led to protests, such as the Rif social movement of 2016-2017. At the same time, it is an area of great cultural and scenic richness: from the Strait of Gibraltar to the peaks of the Rif, from the blue of Chefchaouen to the Andalusian medinas of Tetouan, northern Morocco is a bridge region, between Africa and Europe, between Arabic, Berber and Spanish.
On the road from Marrakech to the desert, after crossing the High Atlas over the Tizi n'Tichka pass, one of Morocco's most iconic landscapes comes into view: the ksar of Ait Ben Haddou, a fortified cluster of ochre adobe houses climbing a hillside beside the Ounila river. A ksar is a fortified earthen village, typical of southern Morocco, and this is the most spectacular and best preserved of them all.
Its reason for being was trade. Ait Ben Haddou rose on the old caravan route that for centuries linked Marrakech with the Sahara and, beyond it, with sub-Saharan Africa. Caravans laden with gold, salt, spices, ivory and slaves came through here, heading up from Timbuktu and the Sudan towards the cities of the north. Prominent families built these mud kasbahs (tower houses with decorated walls) as homes, as defences and as storehouses for goods. The material, rammed earth (tapial) and adobe, is both humble and fragile: it needs constant upkeep, because the rains gradually wash it away.
That setting of red earth, crenellated walls and decorated towers made Ait Ben Haddou a natural film set: its walls have served as the backdrop for films such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Jewel of the Nile, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gladiator and The Mummy, and for series such as Game of Thrones, where it was the city of Yunkai. Listed as a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1987, it is today one of the most visited places in the south and the symbol of Moroccan earthen architecture.
Ouarzazate, at the foot of the High Atlas and on the threshold of the desert, is the major city of southern Morocco and a historic crossroads between the north of the country and the Sahara. Its name, of Berber origin, is usually translated as "without noise" or "place without confusion". For centuries it was a stopping point for caravans and a stronghold controlled by powerful local families; the Kasbah of Taourirt, at the entrance to the city, was the seat of the Glaoui, the clan that came to dominate the whole of southern Morocco in the early 20th century.
During the protectorate, the French made Ouarzazate a military and administrative base to control the tribes of the south and the desert frontier, and gave it its modern layout. But what has made it famous worldwide is cinema. The quality of its light, the variety of its landscapes (mountains, oases, gorges, dunes, kasbahs) and the closeness of locations such as Ait Ben Haddou turned the region into one of the great natural film sets on the planet.
Since the mid-20th century, dozens of blockbusters have been shot here, and the city is home to large film studios (Atlas Studios, among the largest in the world by area) that have earned it the nickname "the Hollywood of the desert" or "Ouallywood". Its landscapes have hosted everything from biblical and Roman epics to adventure films and fantasy series. Today Ouarzazate combines that film industry with desert tourism and cutting-edge projects such as the gigantic Noor solar complex, one of the largest concentrated solar power plants in the world and a symbol of Morocco's commitment to renewables.
In the far south-east of Morocco, where the country dissolves into the great desert, Merzouga is the gateway to one of the most impressive landscapes of the Sahara: Erg Chebbi, a sea of golden sand dunes that rise to around 150 metres and change colour with the daylight. This is the Morocco of desert postcards, where travellers spend the night in camps under a star-studded sky and cross the dunes on the back of a dromedary, as the caravans once did.
Because this remote corner was never empty. For more than a thousand years, southern Morocco was the starting and finishing point of the trans-Saharan trade, the routes that crossed the world's largest desert to link the Maghreb with sub-Saharan Africa. Through here, and through the nearby oasis of Sijilmasa (now in ruins, near Rissani, in the Tafilalt), passed the caravans that carried salt, textiles and manufactured goods south and brought back gold from the Sudan, ivory, ostrich feathers and slaves. Sijilmasa was for centuries one of the richest cities in the country, the "gateway to the desert", and it was from the Tafilalt oasis, very close to Merzouga, that the Alaouite dynasty, which still reigns in Morocco, emerged in the 17th century.
The region is also home to communities with a long history: Berber tribes, nomadic Arab peoples and descendants of sub-Saharan slaves and traders, whose blend is reflected in the local music, such as that of the Gnawa or of the ensembles of Khamlia, a nearby village inhabited by descendants of Africans from south of the Sahara. Merzouga and its desert are therefore not just a natural spectacle, but the living memory of the routes that for centuries connected Morocco with the heart of Africa.
South of Ouarzazate, the Draa valley traces a long green ribbon through the dry land: a vast palm grove that winds for more than a hundred kilometres between bare mountains and mud kasbahs, following the course of the Draa, Morocco's longest river, which in flood used to reach the Atlantic and today usually fades out in the desert sands. It is one of the most spectacular oases in the country, a world of date palms, gardens, irrigation channels and earthen villages that seem to grow out of the ground itself.
The Draa was one of the great routes to the south. Caravans of the trans-Saharan trade travelled up and down its valley, and its oases gave rise to a complex, stratified society where, for centuries, Berber tribes lived alongside Arab families of sharifian descent, Jewish communities (now gone, but they left mellahs and synagogues in many villages) and the Haratin, dark-skinned farmers descended from sub-Saharan peoples who worked the land of the oases. In fact, it was from the Draa valley and the neighbouring Souss region that the Saadians came, the sharifian dynasty that unified Morocco in the 16th century and drove out the Portuguese.
Life in the Draa has always revolved around water and the date palm. Irrigation was organised through sophisticated systems for sharing floodwater and through khettaras, and the date palm provided food, shade, timber and fibre. Today the palm grove suffers from drought, the spread of the desert and bayoud disease, which attacks the palms, and many of its inhabitants have emigrated. But the valley keeps its beauty and its chain of kasbahs, such as those of Agdz, Tamnougalt and Zagora, where an old sign read "52 days to Timbuktu" by camel, recalling its role as the great corridor between Morocco and the Sahara.
North-east of Ouarzazate, the road that skirts the southern flank of the High Atlas runs through a series of valleys and gorges of breathtaking beauty, dotted with so many mud fortresses that it is known as the "road of a thousand kasbahs". The Dades valley winds between oddly shaped mountains and reddish rocks, with oases and Berber villages at the foot of the kasbahs; further east, the Todra gorges form a spectacular canyon where the river has carved sheer walls up to three hundred metres high, a paradise for climbers and hikers.
This whole region is, above all, Amazigh land. The Atlas mountains were always the refuge of the Berber tribes who preserved their language, Tamazight, and their customs against outside influences. Here live peoples such as the Ait Atta and other confederations that for centuries governed their valleys almost autonomously, with their own assemblies and customary law, and that fiercely resisted colonial penetration: some of these mountains were not "pacified" by the French until the 1930s, well into the protectorate.
Earthen architecture (kasbahs, ksour, collective granaries or agadirs perched on the heights) is the expression of that mountain culture, adapted to a harsh environment of scorching summers and freezing winters. Life revolves around farming in the oases and irrigated valleys, the seasonal movement of flocks between highlands and plains, the brightly coloured rugs woven by women, and traditions (music, dances, festivals, tattoos) that make the Atlas one of the great reservoirs of Morocco's Amazigh identity. Travelling the Dades and the Todra means stepping into that deep, Berber, age-old Morocco, very different from that of the great imperial cities.
Hardly anything that happened to Morocco happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
