Morocco, a country on the northwestern edge of Africa, is a fascinating place, with a diversity of cultural influences and a wide variety of landscapes.
These initial impressions are based on our time in Tangier, Rabat, and Chefchaouen (plus a day trip to Casablanca), all in the northwestern part of the country. We have many other places to visit in Morocco, so our impressions may change a bit as our trip goes on.
People really, really don’t like having their picture taken
Especially women and people with children. That’s increasingly true in many places, as people worry about AI scrapping photos of them that are posted online. But it’s more the case in Morocco now than anywhere else we’ve been. As a result, our photo galleries for Morocco will have fewer pictures of people than usual—only people who have agreed to be photographed or whose faces aren’t identifiable.
Those constraints are forcing Melissa and other photographers to be much more careful in how they do street photography. Each day we glimpse some scene of daily life in Morocco (a face in a window, an adorable child, a man on a donkey) that we so wish we could capture. At least interesting buildings, beautiful scenery, and cute animals don’t mind how many pictures we take of them.
There are cats everywhere!
(You’ll see this reflected in our photo galleries too.) Morocco is a mainly Muslim country, and cats have a special place in Islam. They’re considered especially clean animals and thus are welcome in homes, mosques, and pretty much anywhere else. The fact that some stories say the Prophet Muhammad had a pet cat makes them even more cherished.
Wherever you walk, day or night, on all but the busiest roads you’ll see cats prowling around or lounging on sidewalks, in doorways, on steps, or on the patios of outdoor restaurants. Even the stray cats look fairly well cared for, as evidenced by the dishes of water, tins of cat food, or piles of kibble or small fish left out for them. When we were housesitting near Rabat, our instructions including not only looking after the two resident cats, but also putting out kibble on the walkway every morning for some other local cats who came around regularly looking for a meal.
Many little sidewalk shops we’ve seen have large open bags of kibble for sale in the front so passersby can purchase a snack for the local cats. Some of those cats have the sense to sit just outside the shop, as if to say “See, our food is right there.”
The care that some Moroccans give street cats is truly heartwarming. While exploring at dusk on our first day in Tangier, we came upon a hilltop park where a man was refilling food and water and lifting kittens into a complex of cardboard boxes, connected by plastic tubes and covered with blankets, to keep them sheltered from the cold night wind. As we watched, he held up kittens for us to see, and we traded smiles over our shared love of Islam’s favorite animal.
Things are different during Ramadan
Our first three days in Morocco were the last three days of Ramadan—the holy month when, along with other observances, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking, and indulging in other bodily pleasures from sunrise to sunset. Ramadan is an interesting time for non-Muslims to travel in an officially Muslim country. In our hotel room in the old section of Tangier, we were awakened each morning at 4:50 by the cacophony of the call to prayer being delivered, slightly out of sync, from several nearby mosques (the Muslim equivalent of European church bells). Happily, we could roll over and go back to sleep since we didn’t need to rush to eat a big meal before sunrise. Our hotel gave us breakfast later in the morning. (I often feel sorry for people who have to make or serve food while they’re fasting, but Muslims say that’s part of the spiritual discipline of Ramadan.)
Many restaurants and shops were closed in the morning and early afternoon, and the streets were quieter than usual. Museums and other tourist sites were generally open, though, so we had places to visit. We tried to be sensitive to the people around us who were fasting—for instance, by ducking into a closed doorway to take a quick sip from our water bottles, or by having picnic lunches in our room, away from public view. (The half-wheel of our favorite Spanish cheese, payoyo, that we’d brought from Cadiz was a lifesaver.)
By late afternoon, stores and restaurants reopened, and the streets bustled with people chatting and shopping for their end-of-the-day meal. That was a wonderful time to stroll or sit in a park and people-watch as Tangier came back to life, like desert flowers blooming after a rain.
Many people we saw were wearing traditional Moroccan clothing: a floor-length, long-sleeved, hooded robe called a djellaba. Women’s robes were often made of brightly colored or printed fabric and worn with a different brightly colored headscarf (hijab). Many men wore their robe with the hood up, and the point at the top of the hood make them look like Jawas in Star Wars. Initially, we thought djellabas were almost universal Moroccan dress. But as the days went on and we saw a greater diversity of clothing, we realized that some people were wearing them especially for Ramadan.
The holy month can be hard time for a nonobservant Muslim in Morocco. Restaurants and cafes that remain open won’t serve food to a Moroccan during the day, and any nonforeigners seen breaking the rules may be publicly chastised. A young man who worked at our hotel—with whom we’d chatted a lot because of his friendless and very good English—offered one morning to take us on a walking tour of Tangier. After a long stroll, he asked if we wanted tea and steered us to one of the few open (but empty) cafes on the far side of the old city from our hotel. Once inside, he spoke only English to the server. We soon realized he was pretending to be a tourist so he could join us in a daytime drink and snack.
We didn’t mind, and we sympathized with his plight. When he and Melissa discovered a shared love of drawing, they sat and traded sketches of each other while he smoked cigarettes (after asking our permission) out the open window. It was a pleasant break and an interesting glimpse into the sometimes hidden diversity of viewpoints in Morocco.
Northern Morocco looks like southern Spain
Peoples and cultures have been going back and forth across the Strait of Gibraltar for millennia. The Muslims from North Africa who conquered and then ruled much of what are now Spain and Portugal from the 700s to the 1400s called their territory Al-Andalus. That name lives on in Andalucia, the southernmost province of Spain and the last to be recaptured from the Muslims.
Catholic Spaniards in southern Spain are proud of their Andalucian identity. On the other side of the strait, a segment of Moroccan society also proudly claims the identity Andalucian. They’re the descendants of Muslims and Jews who were expelled from Spain after the Catholic reconquest. In Morocco, the exiles founded new towns or revived fading ones and built in the style of the places they’d left behind. Many of the oldest parts of cities and towns we’ve visited (such as Tangier, Rabat, and Chefchaouen) look a lot like the whitewashed villages (pueblos blancos) of southern Spain.
According to an anthropological study Melissa found, elite Andalucian families in Morocco have tended through the centuries to marry among themselves. As a result, they generally have much lighter complexions and hair color than other Moroccans. Riding a bus through the city of Tetouan, a center of Andalucian ethnicity, we were struck by how much people we saw on the streets looked like people we’d seen a few weeks earlier in the south of Spain.
Old Moroccan cities have a certain uniformity of design
Once you learn the names for parts of one old Moroccan city or town, you’re pretty well set for visiting the rest of them. There’s the kasbah, the original fort around which the city developed. It’s usually located on the highest point in the area, next to the sea or the city’s main river (the better to control trade and keep an eye out for possible invaders). Kasbahs often held the ruler’s palace and lovely gardens. In many cases, they’ve now been turned into museums.
The old city that grew up around the kasbah is called the medina. Invariably, much of it consists of a tangle of alleys, some covered, that are only wide enough to be traversed on foot or by motorbike. Occasional plazas with fountains (sometimes next to a mosque, school, or gate) provide a bit of room for people to spread out and for restaurants to put out tables. Many alleys in the medina are lined with one-room stalls or slightly bigger shops selling food, clothing, home goods, craft items, and souvenirs. The traditional (now usually former) Jewish section of the medina is called the mellah. Although today medinas contain lots of hotels and restaurants aimed at tourists, many people still live there as well.
Medinas are generally surrounded by thick, tall earthen walls with a few arch-shaped openings to the outside. Those gates, or bab, are sometimes richly carved or tiled. They’re busy places and common meeting points, being the closest spot that taxis, buses, and delivery trucks can come to the medina.
At least one area outside the medina is typically called the nouvelle ville (French for “new city”). That area usually has broad roads, modern hotels, government and corporate buildings, and the city’s train and bus stations. Invariably, some of the main roads are named after the previous king (Hassan II) or his father (Muhammad V). In some cities, the area that’s now called the nouvelle ville wasn’t built until the early 20th century, when the French established a protectorate in Morocco. Before that, the city’s residents all lived in the medina.
Depending on where you are, you’ll be greeted in French or Spanish
Morocco’s main language is a dialect of Arabic, of which we know only a few words. When I read that about one-third of Moroccans speak French, which is widely taught in schools, I focused on dusting off my high school French. It’s come in handy when buying museum tickets, haggling with taxi drivers, and reading restaurant menus. In Rabat, people who look like tourists are often greeted with bonjour (“hello” in French) as an opening gambit. All of that makes sense given that Morocco was a French colony from 1912 until 1956.
So I was surprised, when I got to the northern mountain town of Chefchaouen, a popular tourist destination, to be greeted with hola instead of bonjour. It turns out that while France was ruling most of Morocco, Spain was ruling a strip along the northern coast and mountains (the part of Morocco directly across the Mediterranean Sea from Spain). Today, that area still gets lots of visitors from Spain, and many people who work in service industries speak or understand Spanish. Thank goodness that many people in Chefchaouen also speak or understand English. Otherwise, my brain might break from trying to switch back and forth between two similar languages that aren’t my native tongue whenever we move to a different town.
Morocco feels developed one minute and developing the next
Like many middle-income countries, Morocco can feel full of contradictions. High-speed trains whisk passengers between cities, pulling into modern stations that house McDonalds and Starbucks and trampoline parks to entertain the kids. Morocco boasts one of the largest and most impressive modern mosques in the world (in Casablanca). And it’s embarking on building massive stadiums to hold international sporting events, including soccer’s World Cup in 2030.
At the same time, the tap water in many places isn’t drinkable. (That’s one reason Moroccans drink a lot of tea and fruit juice.) Trash is a perennial problem. And the standard of driving in cities tends to be crazy. Things like lanes and right-of-way rules are the merest suggestions, not to be followed if they’ll slow a driver down. Of course, much of that was true of Naples, Italy, when we visited it 18 years ago. Two decades from now, who knows what Morocco will be like?
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