Sefrou — All about Sefrou

Older than Fes?

Sefrou is one of Morocco's oldest towns. Long before the Arabs arrived, Amazigh tribes lived on the banks of the Aggai river; the name is said to come from the Ahel Sefrou tribe. According to Leo Africanus the town was built before Fes, and the chronicler Ibn Abi Zar wrote that "one went from the town of Sefrou to the village of Fes".

In 807, as work on Fes began, Idris II settled for two years in a village on the Aggai called Habbouna, "those who loved us", now a quarter south of the medina. Walls and forts were raised at this time.

On the date road

Sefrou lies at a crossroads of caravan routes, including the "date road" linking Fes to Sijilmassa and the Tafilalet, along which African gold also travelled. The 11th-century geographer al-Bakri described it as "surrounded by streams and gardens".

On the foothills and in the valley, wheat, barley, olives, vines and flax were grown thanks to an ancient irrigation network.

Morocco's "little Jerusalem"

Sefrou was home to one of Morocco's largest Jewish communities, up to about 8,000 people; in the 19th century Jews outnumbered Muslims there. They had varied origins: Judaised Amazighs, families from the Tafilalet, Arabic-speaking Jews from Fes and descendants of the 1492 exiles from Spain. The rabbi and judge Shaul Yehoshua Abitbol (1740-1809) wrote a famous collection of legal rulings here.

The writer Colette described the town as an "earthly paradise". Most Jewish families left for Israel, mainly around 1967.

The cherry town

Sefrou became a municipality in 1917, then the capital of its own province on 1 January 1991. Since 1920 it has celebrated the cherry harvest every June with a festival, listed in 2012 as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage.

In the 1960s the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz made Sefrou one of the most famous fieldwork sites in the anthropology of Morocco.

The cherry festival

Every June since the early 20th century: parades, music, and the crowning of the cherry queen.

A town of coexistence

In the mid-20th century nearly a third of Sefrou's residents were Jewish. Muslims and Jews shared trade, crafts and holy places such as the Kef el-Moumen cave. Most Jewish families left in the 1950s-60s.

Sefrou speech

Sefrou darija is close to that of Fes; around it, Middle Atlas villages speak Tamazight.