Tangier — All about Tangier

Tingis, Phoenician and Roman port

Tangier was founded as a Phoenician trading post, probably by the 8th century BC. By the 6th century the Berber tombs around it held Punic jewellery, a sign of brisk trade, and Carthage made it an important port in the 5th century. The town long kept its Phoenician traditions: under the Mauretanian kings it struck coins in Punic script.

The Greeks called it Tingis and told its legend: Tinge, widow of the giant Antaeus, bore Hercules a son, Sufax, who founded the town in her honour. Under Emperor Claudius, Tingis became a Roman colony and capital of the province of Mauretania Tingitana. In 298 two Christians, Saints Marcellus and Cassian, were beheaded here during the Great Persecution.

Vandals, Byzantines and the Arab conquest (429-740)

In 429 tens of thousands of Vandals led by Gaiseric crossed from Spain to Africa and occupied Tingis. In 533 the Byzantine general Belisarius retook it for Emperor Justinian, but the administration settled at Septem (Ceuta), easier to defend.

The town fell after a siege led by Musa ibn Nusayr between 707 and 711. It was from Tangier that his lieutenant Tariq ibn Ziyad launched the conquest of Spain in 711. The town became the Umayyads' capital of the far Maghreb, but heavy tributes imposed on the Berbers sparked the great revolt of 740: Maysara al-Matghari took Tangier, and the "Battle of the Nobles", fought near the town, decimated the Arab aristocracy of North Africa.

Between Moroccan dynasties (790-1471)

Idris I passed through Tangier before founding his kingdom and took the town around 790. In the 10th century it was contested between the caliphate of Cordoba and the Fatimids; Cordoba took it in 949. The Almoravids captured it in 1077, then the Almohads in 1147, under whom its port was very active. The Marinids had to besiege it for three months in 1274 to win its submission.

It was in this Marinid Tangier that Ibn Battuta was born in 1304; he left for Mecca at twenty and travelled for nearly thirty years, from China to Mali. In the late 14th century corsairs from Tangier and Salé began harassing ships in the strait.

Portuguese, then English (1471-1684)

After taking Ceuta in 1415, the Portuguese failed before Tangier in 1437, 1458 and 1464, then occupied it unopposed on 28 August 1471, the garrison having fled on hearing of Asilah's fall. They turned the great mosque into a cathedral. In 1661 the town was given to King Charles II of England as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry.

The English, constantly attacked by Khadir Ghailan's mujahideen, lost about 470 men in an ambush on 4 May 1664. They built a 438-metre mole to make it a major naval port, at enormous waste. After Moulay Ismail's siege (1678-1680), Parliament gave up: the English spent five months destroying the town and port and left; Morocco retook Tangier on 7 February 1684.

The city of diplomats (18th-19th century)

Repopulated by the governors Ali ibn Abdallah and his son Ahmed, Tangier became Morocco's diplomatic seat in the 18th century. The United States opened its first consulate here under George Washington; in 1821 Sultan Moulay Slimane gave them a house, the future American Legation, the first property owned by the US government abroad.

The Prince de Joinville's French fleet bombarded the town on 6 August 1844 during the Franco-Moroccan war. The Italian revolutionary Garibaldi lived here in exile from 1849. In the 1870s every foreign embassy and consulate was in Tangier, which then had about 20,000 inhabitants, 400 of them foreigners.

The Tangier crisis (1905)

In 1905 the German emperor Wilhelm II landed in Tangier and declared himself in favour of Moroccan independence, against French ambitions: the Tangier crisis nearly caused a war. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 ended it, placing the town's police and customs under international control.

That same year, 1905, Sultan Abd al-Aziz had Morocco's first newspaper, Lisan al-Maghrib, founded in Tangier. Before the First World War the town had about 40,000 inhabitants: half Muslim, a quarter Jewish and a quarter European Christians, mostly Spaniards.

The International Zone (1923-1956)

The 1912 Treaty of Fes left Tangier's status undecided. A convention signed in Paris on 18 December 1923 created the Tangier International Zone, run by France, Spain and Britain, joined by Italy from 1928. Over 373 km² the town became a tax haven and a refuge: Spanish republicans and nationalists, Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, Moroccan dissidents. Around 1935 it had about 50,000 inhabitants, 12,000 of them Jewish.

Franco's Spain occupied the town on 14 June 1940, the day Paris fell, until 11 October 1945. On 9 April 1947 Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef gave the Tangier speech there, calling for Morocco's unity and independence. In 1951 the nationalist parties signed the National Front pact in the city.

Moroccan Tangier

Meeting in Rabat in July 1952, the protecting powers agreed to abolish the zone, and Tangier rejoined Morocco with independence in 1956. It then had about 40,000 Muslims, 31,000 Christians and 15,000 Jews.

After decades of neglect, the city was transformed in the 21st century: the Tanger Med port opened in 2007 and became one of the Mediterranean's largest container ports, the Al Boraq high-speed train to Rabat and Casablanca arrived in 2018, and the medina and Tanger Ville port were renovated.

A city of literature

From Choukri to Bowles, from Burroughs to Jean Genet, Tangier inspired a whole literature; the Librairie des Colonnes, open since 1949, keeps its memory.

Music of the north

The Andalusian and tarab tradition, the Jbala music of the nearby mountains, and the Tanjazz festival every autumn.

The Tanjawis

Tangier has always been a place of passage: Jbala mountain families, Riffians, Spaniards, English and Sephardic Jews lived here together. Tanjawis have kept an openness and irony they're proud of, and a fierce attachment to their football club, Ittihad Tanger.

A darija full of Spanish

Northern speech borrows heavily from Spanish ("cuchara" for spoon, "semana" for week), and most Tanjawis speak Spanish, often better than French.