Kenitra — All about Kenitra

Thymiaterion and Thamusida

Several historians identify the mouth of the Sebou, at Mehdia, with the trading post of Thymiaterion, which the Carthaginian navigator Hanno said he founded in the 6th century BC, two days beyond the Pillars of Hercules, above a great plain.

From about AD 40 to 280 the small Roman town of Thamusida stood on the left bank of the Sebou, some twenty kilometres away. In the 10th century Arab authors mention a town at the river mouth called al-Ma'mura, "the flourishing". In the 12th century the Almohads settled Arab tribes on the Gharb plain, where they lived alongside the Berbers.

The 1895 kasbah and the "little bridge"

Between 1895 and 1896, under Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz, a kasbah was built on the left bank of the Sebou: a square about a hundred metres a side, flanked by towers. On 19 May 1911 the French captain Petitjean was killed in a fight two kilometres away; his body was brought back to the kasbah.

The town's name comes from the Arabic qnitra, "little bridge", after a culvert built over a stream upstream of the kasbah, destroyed in 1928.

Port-Lyautey (1912-1956)

The modern town was built on Lyautey's orders from 1912, with a master plan signed on 19 December 1914, around a river port on the Sebou. In 1932 it was renamed Port-Lyautey.

On 8 November 1942, during Operation Torch, American troops landed at Mehdia, at the mouth of the Sebou, to seize the Port-Lyautey naval air base, opened in 1939, and the railway junction towards Algeria. After hard fighting around the Mehdia kasbah, a ceasefire came on 11 November. The Americans set up an air base here, which operated until 1991.

Kenitra today

In March 1956, at independence, the town took back the name Kenitra. It became a major industrial and university centre of the Gharb plain, with Ibn Tofail University.

In the 21st century the Atlantic Free Zone has drawn car factories, including Stellantis's plant, and since 2018 the town has been served by the Al Boraq high-speed train between Tangier and Casablanca.

A Gharb town

Capital of the Gharb farming plain, Kenitra has also become a hub of the car industry.

A young city

Kenitra was born in the 20th century and was settled by workers, railwaymen and Gharb plain farmers. With its university and car factories, it's now a city of students and engineers.

Gharb darija

Gharb darija is rural and sing-song, close to that of the Atlantic plains.