This week’s travel dream: Tangier without a map

Tangier has always been a place “lost in time and space,” said Matt Gross in The New York Times. Since antiquity, the Moroccan city at the mouth of the Mediterranean has been a “gray zone between Africa and Europe, never quite belonging fully to one or the other.” I arrived on its shores determined to “break free of the constraints of modern travel” by getting lost in its “messy nowhere.” I had no map, no guidebook, not even a hotel reservation. I would let Tangier guide me.

A taxi dropped me off at the bottom of the city’s historic quarter, or medina. In this “ancient and befuddling labyrinth,” I “surrendered to the whims of my limbs.” Within moments, I was presented with vivid vignettes of Tangier life: “Birds sang in a monumental cage,” a hooded woman filled a bucket from a pump, and a blind man in his prayer cap sat alongside a stucco wall. The buildings “huddled close together,” shadowing narrow streets whose jumbled intersections were “crowded with women shopping for melons and motorcycles hauling bales of mint.”

“With nothing on my agenda, I took things as they came.” I munched on bean stew and deep-fried sardines at the “dingy-but-welcoming” Restaurant Victoria. I asked a man sitting on a curb with his daughter his views on fatherhood. His reply: “You have to be a professor, a magician, a singer, a dancer.” I also wandered east of the medina into the neighborhood of Marshan, where “broad avenues ran past grandly decaying mansions and pristine palaces.” There, I stumbled upon a “derelict house with luxurious gardens” and a sprawling Muslim graveyard “shimmering” in the fading daylight. As the sun began to set, I headed back through the chaos of the medina and up to the casbah, its walled fortress. Inside, I discovered an open-air rooftop cafe, Le Salon Bleu, and its “unparalleled” views of the city. From the medina to the beaches on the bay to hillside houses in the distance, I could see Tangier in all its exotic splendor, “on the cusp of two worlds, one known, the other a mystery.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Contact: Visitmorocco.com