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Morocco Tourists Attractions. Popular Moroccan Cities. Marrakech Agadir Fes Casablanca Rabat Tangier Essaouir. Marrakech.
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Popular Moroccan Cities • Marrakech • Agadir • Fes • Casablanca • Rabat • Tangier • Essaouir
Marrakech • Marrakech – "Morocco City", as early travelers called it – has always been something of a pleasure city, a marketplace where the southern tribesmen and Berber villagers bring in their goods, spend their money and find entertainment. For visitors it's an enduring fantasy – a city of immense beauty before a great shaft of mountains – and immediately exciting. At the heart of it all is a square, Djemaa El Fna, really no more than an open space in the centre of the city, but the stage for a long-established ritual in which shifting circles of onlookers gather round groups of acrobats, drummers, pipe musicians, dancers, storytellers, comedians and fairground acts.
Marrakech Continued • The city's architectural attractions are compelling including: the immense, still basins of the Agdal and Menara gardens, the delicate Granada-style carving of the Saadian Tombs and, above all, the Koutoubia Minaret, the most perfect Islamic monument in North Africa.
Agadir • Flanked by a strip of fertilizer factories, a vast grain silo and sardine-canning plants, SAFI is not the prettiest of Moroccan towns. It does, however, provide a glimpse of an active, modern and working community and the old Medina in its centre, walled and turreted by the Portuguese, holds a certain interest. The city – it merits the name with a population of over 300,000 – also has a strong industrial-artisan tradition, with a whole quarter devoted to pottery workshops. These have a virtual monopoly on the green, heavily glazed roof tiles used on palaces and mosques, as well as providing Morocco's main pottery exports, in the form of bowls, plates and garden pots.
Agadir Continued • The main interest in Safi is in its Medina, the adjoining Dar El Bahar fort, and the Colline des Potiers, the potters' quarter on the hill northeast of the Medina. Further out, on the Oualidia road, is the main industrial quarter and the new port. • South of Safi, the coast is heavily polluted and industrialized, and for a beach escape you'll want to head north. Local buses #10 and #15 run to Lalla Fatna and Cap Beddouza from the Place de l'Indépendance. In summer there are also local buses to Souira Kedima.
Fes • The most ancient of the Imperial Capitals, and the most complete medieval city of the Arab world, FES is a place that stimulates your senses, with haunting and beautiful sounds, infinite visual details and unfiltered odors. More than any other city in Morocco, it seems to exist suspended in time somewhere between the Middle Ages and the modern world. As with other Moroccan cities, it has a French-built Ville Nouvelle – familiar and modern in appearance and urban life – but a quarter or so of Fes's 800,000 inhabitants continue to live in the extraordinary Medina-city of Fes El Bali – which owes little to the West besides its electricity and its tourists.
Casablanca • If the Hollywood image of 'Casablanca' is important to you, be careful about visiting Casablanca. No other city in Morocco is further away from the romantic Orientalism presented in the classical film of 1942. Actually the film has never been correct about the image presented of the city that gave the film its name. The Orient is found all over Morocco, Casablanca is a modern city, and beautiful in its own respect. The centre of Casablanca is fairly impressive. It's squeaky modern, with big, lively boulevards, high, white, well-kept buildings. And it's clean and efficient. People visiting Casablanca as their first city, could easily end up hating this place: There are few things here confirming the newcomers conception on the Orient. But for people having visited other parts of Morocco first, Casablanca is good!
Casablanca Continued • The city is modern in a Moroccan way, and an excellent example of Moroccans capacity of taking charge of the future of their country. But as soon as you step out of the impressive centre of town, dark clouds cover the realities of people here. Extreme poverty and prostitution only to be matched by Tangier is what you'll find without even looking for it. No other place in the country displays bigger differences between the haves and the have-nots. If anything in Casablanca should fit the Casablanca of Bergman and Bogart, it should be the old city. It's small, consisting mainly of smaller houses, which all seem to be from this century, and the alleyways dominating in other old cities, are rarely found here. There is a good market here, but look around before you buy, shop keepers here know their skills. Some thousand people live here, and in one or two spots, true beauty occurs.
Rabat • Capital of the nation since independence – and, before that, from 1912 to 1956, of the French Protectorate – RABAT is in many ways the city you'd expect: elegant in its spacious European grid, slightly self-conscious in its civilized modern ways, and, as an administrative centre, a little bit dull. If you arrive during Ramadan, you'll find the main avenues and boulevards an astonishing night-long promenade – at other times, it's hard to find a café open past ten at night. Rabat, as they tell you in Casa, is provincial.
Rabat Continued • None of this makes any difference to the considerable historic and architectural interest in the city – and across the estuary in Salé– which includes some of the finest and oldest Arab monuments in the country, dating from the Almohad and Merenid dynasties. You can spend an enjoyable few days looking round these, and out on the local beaches, and there is a major plus in that, unlike Fes or Marrakesh, you can get round the place quite happily without a guide, and talk in cafés with people who do not depend on tourist money.
Tangier • Today, Tangier attracts around one million visitors every year. In summer, it is one of the few Moroccan towns that offers a degree of relief from the heat. Tangier also stands at cultural and commercial cross-roads, and is a stepping stone between Europe and Africa, Tangier is the gateway to Morocco. Tangier is the main port of the ferries coming from Europe, and almost no other place in Morocco holds more discos than Tangier. But they are totally different from the European ones. You should enter these for the sake of the music, but stay away if you're going for company. Inside you find small orchestras playing classical Arabic music, and if you like this kind of music, it's some of the performers here are first class. The music they play is rarely heard outside North Africa.
Tangier Continued • The women you meet at the discos, are prostitutes. And they don't only stick to discos and night clubs, you get approached by them even in normal restaurants. What surprises you, is their bluntness, and the acceptance of ordinary Moroccans around. But still Tangier is a very nice city, close to the sea, a long beach, an exotic old city. But sadly, the hustlers here are so professional that they're organized (actually true!). The moment you come out of the quay area, they run for you. And unlike hustlers in any other place in Morocco, there is nothing you can do to get rid of them. But do remember, many of them are good people, as long as you don't trust them too much. So choose one of them, bargain a price (1$/hour is maximum), and enjoy. If an experience like this doesn't frighten you, Morocco will be yours. Otherwise, you should choose another port for entering Morocco, and enter with air plane.
Essaouira • ESSAOUIRA is by popular acclaim Morocco's most likeable resort: an eighteenth-century town, enclosed by medieval-looking battlements, facing a cluster of rocky offshore islands, and trailed by a vast expanse of empty sands and dunes. Many of the foreign tourists making their own way to Essaouira, are drawn by the wind, known locally as the alizee, which in spring and summer can be a bit remorseless for sunbathing but creates much-sought-after waves for surfing and windsurfing. In recent years, the town has gained quite a reputation in this respect, promoting itself as "Wind City, Africa" and hosting national and international surfing contests.
Essaouira Continued • The life of the resort, too, is easy and uncomplicated, and very much in the image of the youthful Europeans and Marrakech's who come here on holiday. Not that Essaouira is exclusively a backpackers' resort – these days it attracts all kinds of independent travelers, and increasing numbers of packages, with new chain hotels and villas springing up along the corniche. But, as yet, it's very far from spoilt, and remains a thoroughly enjoyable base to rest up after being in the cities, the Atlas or the desert.
