Oujda

Oujda was founded in 994 by Ziri ibn Atiyya, a chief of the Zenata Maghrawa, on the open plain between the Beni-Snassen mountains and the high steppe. The site had no natural defences but sat on the route between the Moroccan interior and Tlemcen, and that position made the city both prosperous and vulnerable. Over the following centuries it changed hands repeatedly between dynasties based in Fès and those based in Tlemcen, and it was sacked, rebuilt and re-walled many times; the Marinids and later the Alaouites both invested in its fortifications and mosques.

The modern frontier reached Oujda in the nineteenth century. After France conquered Algeria, French forces defeated the Moroccan sultan's army at the battle of Isly near the city in 1844, and the treaties that followed began to fix a border where none had existed. France occupied Oujda in 1907, five years before the protectorate was formally declared, and rebuilt it as a garrison and administrative town with boulevards, barracks and a railway to Fès.

During the Algerian war of independence the city was a rear base for the Algerian National Liberation Front, and several future Algerian leaders, among them Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was born here, were associated with it. Independence and then the closure of the land border in 1994 changed Oujda's role again, cutting the cross-border traffic on which much of its trade had depended and leaving it, for a time, a city facing a wall. Investment since has gone into a university, the airport, a motorway and industrial zones.

Oujda belongs as much to the cultural world of western Algeria as to that of Casablanca or Marrakesh. Its dialect, its cooking and its music are shared with Tlemcen and Oran: the city is a stronghold of gharnati, the Andalusian classical tradition of the Tlemcen school, named after Granada and performed by orchestras of ouds, violins and percussion, brought over by Algerian families in the twentieth century and celebrated with an annual festival; raï, the popular music of the Oran region, is heard everywhere as well.

The countryside adds another layer. The plains and the Beni-Snassen are known for reggada, a dance of stiff shoulder movements and shouldered rifles performed to drums and the ghaita, and the surrounding tribes maintain tbourida, the mass horseback charge with muskets fired in unison. Weddings in the city combine all of these, often running until dawn.

The population is mixed Arabic-speaking and Amazigh, with Tarifit heard from Riffian families and Tamazight from the mountain villages. Emigration has shaped the city as much as any of it: families with relatives in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain are everywhere, and summer brings the diaspora home for weddings and holidays. Football matters, and Mouloudia of Oujda, founded in 1946, is one of Morocco's older clubs, with a following that fills the boulevards after a win. Manners are formal and unhurried, and the evening promenade along Boulevard Mohammed V is the city's main social ritual.

Some 506,000 people lived in Oujda at the 2024 census, making it the largest city in eastern Morocco and the capital of the Oriental region. Mohammed First University, several hospitals, the regional administration and the army are the major employers, alongside commerce, transport and the food industries that process the region's produce. The airport and the railhead make the city the gateway to the Oriental, and its markets supply a wide rural hinterland.

The closed frontier is part of everyday economics. Informal trade across the border was once a substantial part of local incomes, and its loss, together with the shutting of the coal mines at Jerada to the south-west in 1998, left high unemployment. Remittances from Europe fill some of the gap, and are visible in the villas on the edge of town and in the shops and cafés that open on diaspora money.

Days are shaped by heat and habit. Business starts early and pauses in the afternoon, the markets are busiest in the morning and again after sunset, and the cafés on the boulevards fill with men over mint tea and football talk. Students give the northern districts a different rhythm during term, and in July and August the city swells as families return, weddings fill the halls, and much of Oujda heads to the beaches at Saïdia at weekends.

Oujda's kitchen is eastern Moroccan and shares much with Oran. Karan, the dish most associated with the city, is a baked custard of chickpea flour and eggs, cut into slices and sold hot from carts, seasoned with cumin and eaten in a split roll with harissa; the same food is called karantita in Algeria. Grills near the medina gates turn out skewers, kefta and merguez sausage, eaten with bread, salad and tea.

Home cooking runs to tagines and couscous made with the lamb of the high plateaux, which has a strong flavour from the herbs of the steppe, and to mechoui, whole roast lamb, at weddings and feasts. Berkoukes, a large-grained couscous simmered in a vegetable broth, is winter food, and harira soup, thick with lentils, chickpeas and tomato, appears in the evening and throughout Ramadan.

The surrounding country supplies the rest: clementines and oranges from the irrigated plains near Berkane, olives and olive oil from the Beni-Snassen, almonds and honey from the hills, and fish from the Mediterranean coast an hour away. Pastry shops on the boulevards sell honeyed sweets, briouats and almond cakes, most of all before Eid and during Ramadan, and mint tea is drunk at every hour, sometimes with a sprig of wormwood in winter.