Tangier & the north

Gentlemen in djellabas (long traditional outer robes) sit at the Café Central, on the Petit Soccosquare at the heart of Tangier’s ancient medina, sipping their noss noss: half coffee, half milk. They are absorbed in an animated conversation, which mixes Arabic, Berber, Spanish and French. They are observed by a group of travellers on a Beat generation pilgrimage, who are here to imagine a 1950s Tangier, an “International Zone” governed in six-month turns by foreign countries and populated with artists from Europe and America.

Tangier is where Paul Bowles wrote The Sheltering Sky (1949), where Degas, Delacroix and Matisse nurtured their Orientalist inspiration, where William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry came for exotic living or a puff of kif (marijuana) at a legendary café perched on a cliff, Café Hafa. Tangier has always been a place that has invited mystery and drama – a world of secret agents (no wonder James Bond’s Spectre was shot there) and smugglers, a world of poets and painters. It is where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet, where an international past and a forward-looking future come together. Neglected during the reign of King Hassan II, Tangier’s metamorphosis began in the early 2000s when investors gained a new interest in this border city and built Tangier Med, the largest port in Africa and the Mediterranean.