Chefchaouen

Chefchaouen was founded in 1471 by Moulay Ali ben Rashid, a local sharif, as a fortified base from which to resist Portuguese expansion along the coast at Ceuta, Tangier and Asilah. The kasbah went up first, and the town grew around it in the gap between two peaks that gave it its name, from the Amazigh for the horns. Within a generation it filled with Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain, who brought Andalusian building, crafts and tile-making with them, and whose descendants shaped the town's character for centuries.

For most of its history it was closed to outsiders and almost unknown to Europeans. Only a handful of foreigners are recorded as having entered before the 20th century, usually in disguise, and the town kept a reputation for religious seclusion. In 1920 Spanish troops occupied it as part of the protectorate in the north; they were driven out during the Rif War led by Abd el-Krim and returned in 1926, staying until Moroccan independence in 1956. Spanish schools, a small garrison town below the walls and the Spanish language all date from those decades.

The blue paint that now defines the place is more recent than the town. Explanations differ: that the blue keeps mosquitoes away, that it stands for the sky and heaven and a reminder to lead a spiritual life, and, according to some residents, that the walls were ordered to be painted blue in the 1970s to draw visitors. From the 1960s the town drew travellers, and since the 2000s photographs of its lanes have made it one of the best-known small towns in Morocco, with tourism now the mainstay of its economy.

Chefchaouen is a Jbala town. The people of these western Rif hills speak a rural Arabic dialect rather than the Tarifit of the eastern mountains, and their music, sung poetry and dress — including the striped cloth wrap and the wide straw hat with woollen tassels worn by women from the villages — are still seen on market days. Andalusian descent is a point of local pride, kept up in craft traditions of weaving, leather and wood.

Religion is a strong presence. The town grew around its sharifian founders and has several zawiyas and saints' tombs, and local moussems bring villagers in from the hills. Life is conservative by comparison with Tangier: the square empties after the last prayer, drinking is not a public habit, and families keep a clear line between the street and the house. Spanish is widely understood, and Spanish television and football are followed as they are across the north.

Weaving is the craft most associated with the town, particularly woollen blankets and thick striped cloth sold in the medina shops, along with pottery and leather. The blue walls themselves have become part of the local economy and are repainted regularly, and residents are used to cameras but not always pleased by them — photography in the lanes is a daily negotiation between a town that lives there and visitors who come for the colour.

The 2024 census counted 46,168 people in Chefchaouen, which makes it a small town rather than a city, and the surrounding province is largely rural. The medina holds most of the guesthouses and shops, while families have moved steadily into apartment blocks in the newer quarters below and along the valley road. Donkeys and handcarts still do the work that vehicles cannot inside the walls.

Tourism now supports much of the town, through guesthouses, restaurants, guiding and craft shops, and it is seasonal: crowded from spring to early autumn and quiet in midwinter. Around it the hills farm olives, figs, goats and, as the region has for generations, cannabis — Morocco legalised cultivation for medical and industrial use in 2021, with licensed growing in Chefchaouen province among others. Remittances from relatives working in Spain and the Netherlands matter to many households.

The rhythm is slow and public. Mornings begin with bread from the communal oven and bissara in a doorway café; the square fills in the late afternoon; and the weekly souk brings hill farmers down with produce and livestock. Water, drawn from the mountain springs that made the site, remains a live issue in years of drought, and young people leaving for Tangier, Casablanca or abroad is as common a story here as elsewhere in the Rif.

Chefchaouen eats mountain food. Goat's and sheep's milk cheese, the fresh white jben sold in the market, is the local speciality, eaten with bread and honey or with olives and oil from the surrounding groves. Tagines are heavier and simpler than on the coast — lamb or chicken with vegetables, sometimes with the mountain herbs and wild greens gathered in spring.

Bissara, the thick purée of dried fava beans dressed with olive oil, cumin and paprika, is the standard cheap breakfast, sold from plain counters and eaten with bread. Bread itself is still taken to communal wood-fired ovens in the medina, and morning stalls sell msemen, the folded flatbread fried on a griddle, and baghrir, the spongy pancake full of holes, both eaten with butter and honey.

Mint tea is constant, often made here with a good deal of fresh mint grown in the valley, and coffee is drunk in the square. Sweets follow the Moroccan pattern of almonds, honey and sesame, with chebakia fried in honey during Ramadan. The surrounding country supplies figs, prickly pears, walnuts and apples in season, and the weekly souk is where most households buy them.