El Jadida

The Portuguese seized the small Atlantic anchorage they called Mazagão in 1502 and, in 1514, built a citadel on the shore, whose vaulted underground chamber was turned into a cistern. Faced with Saadian power, they replaced it from 1541 with something far more ambitious: a compact star-shaped fortress with four bastions, thick sloping walls and a sea gate, designed by Italian and Portuguese military engineers. It was one of the first places outside Europe where the new Renaissance system of fortification was applied in full, and it proved almost impossible to storm.

Mazagan held out for more than two centuries, supplied by sea while the coast around it returned to Moroccan control. In 1769, besieged by the forces of Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah, the garrison and the townspeople withdrew, blowing up a bastion as they left. The town stood largely empty and was known for a time as El-Mahdouma, the ruined one. Sultan Abd al-Rahman had it resettled, and in 1820 it was renamed El Jadida, the new one, and a Jewish community that traded with Europe grew up inside the walls, building the synagogue that still stands there.

Under the French protectorate the port was enlarged and a new town laid out outside the ramparts, and the town was promoted as one of Morocco's first seaside resorts. After independence it grew as a provincial capital, a fishing port and a beach resort for Casablanca, while the building of the Jorf Lasfar port and phosphate complex in the 1980s transformed the local economy. In 2004 the Portuguese city was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its fortifications, its cistern and its church.

El Jadida belongs to the Doukkala, the Arabic-speaking farming plain between the Oum Er-Rbia river and the coast, and the culture of the plain shapes the city more than its Portuguese walls do. The Doukkala are known across Morocco for tbourida, the display in which rows of horsemen in full dress charge together and fire their muskets in a single volley; it is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, and the moussem at nearby Moulay Abdallah is one of the largest gatherings where it is performed, drawing thousands of riders, tents and traders each summer.

The city carries a layered history lightly. The ramparts, the church of the Assumption and the synagogue inside the Cité Portugaise are kept as monuments in a town that is otherwise entirely Moroccan and Muslim, and Portuguese visitors and researchers come regularly. The cistern has a second, cinematic fame from Orson Welles's Othello, filmed partly in El Jadida in the early 1950s.

Everyday manners are those of small-town Morocco: long greetings, glasses of mint tea poured from a height, Friday couscous, and the hammam as a weekly ritual. Summer changes the register completely, when families from Casablanca and Moroccans living in Europe arrive, the promenade fills after dark and the beach becomes the centre of social life. Football is followed closely, and the local club Difaâ Hassani El Jadidi is a source of civic pride.

About 238,000 people live in El Jadida at the 2024 census, with more in the towns and villages of the surrounding province. It is a provincial capital with the usual apparatus of courts, hospitals and a university, and the student population from Chouaib Doukkali University gives the centre a young feel during term.

Three things pay the bills: the sea, the plain and industry. The port handles fishing boats and coastal trade, and sardine landings feed processing plants. Inland, the Doukkala plain is one of Morocco's better-watered agricultural districts, growing cereals, sugar beet, tomatoes and fodder and supporting dairying. The largest employer of all is the Jorf Lasfar complex down the coast, where phosphate rock from the interior is turned into fertiliser for export, with a power station alongside; it brings jobs and also concern about air and water pollution.

Tourism is strongly seasonal. For ten months of the year the beachfront hotels are quiet and the city is a working town of markets, offices and traffic around Place Mohammed V; in July and August the population swells and rents jump. Housing development has spread along the coast road towards Azemmour and inland in new estates. Water supply, after years of poor rains across Morocco, and the balance between industry and the beaches are the issues people discuss.

The Atlantic dominates. Sardines are the everyday fish, grilled over charcoal or stuffed in pairs around a paste of coriander, garlic, cumin and paprika and fried, and the port's stalls also sell sole, sea bream, red mullet, prawns and calamari cooked plainly to order. Oysters from the lagoon at Oualidia, down the coast, are sold in the city's fish restaurants and are the region's best-known delicacy.

From the Doukkala plain come lamb and beef for tagines, chickpeas, pumpkin and the wheat for couscous, steamed at home on Fridays over a broth of meat and seven vegetables. Rfissa, shredded msemen flatbread soaked in a fenugreek, lentil and chicken broth, is made for family occasions, and harira, the tomato, lentil and chickpea soup, breaks the fast in Ramadan. Bread is baked at home and taken to the neighbourhood oven, and khlii, meat preserved in fat, turns up in eggs at breakfast.

Street and café food follows the national pattern: bissara, a dried broad bean purée with olive oil and cumin, at breakfast; sfenj doughnuts and msemen with honey; grilled merguez and brochettes in the evening; and mint tea everywhere, often heavily sweetened. Pastry shops sell almond-filled kaab el ghzal and, in Ramadan, chebakia soaked in honey and sesame. On the Corniche in summer, the fixed points of the evening are grilled fish, fresh juices and ice cream.