Africa & Middle East > Morocco > Northern Morocco > Tangier > Articles > Tangier: Journey into the Interzone

Tangier of the ‘forties and early ‘fifties was La Ville de Plaisir. The International Zone had been a wartime haven for the world’s rich and famous and when peace came many continued to transfer their wealth into a city that allowed them certain ‘freedoms’ that could not be bought elsewhere.

‘It was one of the charms of the International Zone that you could get anything you wanted if you paid for it. Do anything, too, for that matter – It was only a matter of price,’ wrote Paul Bowles.

The ‘Interzone’ was a Babel of tongues and intrigues. A place where spies and double agents plotted with thieves, and adventurers drank with millionaires and contrabandistas. It was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world and money was the lingua franca.

In 1942 Tangier boasted 13 mosques, 15 synagogues, six Catholic churches and three Protestant. But there were also more than a dozen European brothels and fifteen Muslim brothels – workplaces for more than 300 girls. Homosexuality was legal and several infamous boy-brothels made Tangier one of the most celebrated gay resorts in the world. Although prostitution, smuggling, gun running and loan sharking were big business, street crime was almost unheard of - simply because in such a small area the Spanish police-force could put their hands on anyone in a matter of hours.

Tangier, during this ‘golden age,’ was famed throughout the world as the City of Dreams. But the Interzone was a state without a political future. Back-to-back with a Muslim majority at a time when the winds of de-colonisation were beating violently, but legitimately, around Morocco, it could not survive for long. Many were the rich and famous who came to live the dream whilst they still could.

As befits one of the main meeting places of the old International Zone, the Petit Socco (small marketplace) is also known simultaneously in Spanish as Zoco Chico and in Arabic as Place Souk Dakhil. This cramped little square was once the celebrated hangout of such literary vagabonds as Tennessee Williams, Ian Fleming, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But it was Paul Bowles (whose Tangier-inspired work includes The Sheltering Sky and Let it Come Down) who was the nucleus of the city’s writing set. Bowles arrived in Tangier with the intention of stopping over for a few weeks and lived there, until his recent death, for over fifty years.

Café life in the Petit Socco seems to have adopted an exaggeratedly extroverted outlook. The seats all face the street so that Café Fuentes in particular, as the largest of these establishments, takes on the appearance of a cinema. The Petit Socco itself is the screen.

And the show? Tangier-based writer, Brion Gysin, described it effectively, in hip sixties jargon: ‘the Zoco Chico, where absurd theatre has been going on in dozens of languages, right around the clock every day since forever, perhaps. Visible tale-ends of old-fashioned Arab plots torn alive out of the Thousand and One Nights shuttle back and forth under your eyes like bright threads running through a gloomy loom of out-of-work cats slapped into uniform Levis.’ Street-theatre Tangerine-style is still as fascinating as ever and entire days are passed on the café terraces, in the peaceful, watchful consumption of mint tea.

A visitor could be forgiven for thinking that Tangier runs on mint tea. Long before the end of the International Zone, when alcohol was banned in the old town, mint tea was the national drink of Morocco. Yet it originally arrived from a very unexpected direction. At the end of the last century, an English ship cruised into the port with a cargo of green tea, which had been diverted from the Crimea by the war there. With few exceptions, the Tangerines considered the infusion weak and tasteless…until somebody dropped a handful of mint leaves into his glass and ‘Whisky Marocain’ was born.

Even under the midday sun this syrupy, lip-tingling drink is incredibly refreshing and provides a visitor with the energy for extensive forays into the different quarters of the city. As is the case with most Moroccan cities, Tangier is divided into two clearly defined quarters: the medina and the ville nouvelle (the French ‘new town’). Visitors invariably find the old town the most evocative.

‘Tangier is a foreign city if ever there was one,’ enthused Mark Twain, ‘and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save the Arabian Nights.’ Wandering through the ancient medina you are continually faced with scenes that could have been torn directly from the pages of that very book. Lying largely within the casements of the 15th century Portuguese fortress, the labyrinthine alleyways and twisting stairways are more reminiscent of the corridors of an ancient, sprawling hotel than any western conception of a town.

One of the greatest joys of Tangier is simply to lose oneself in these corridors. It is the small things that capture the imagination in a Moroccan medina: a fleeting glimpse of a sunlit courtyard as a heavy cedar-wood door closes, a weaver operating a handloom that his fathers may have used three hundred years ago, a white-bearded storyteller fitting a kif pipe together. The Tangier of today is, as much as ever, the city of myth and mystery.

A large alleyway in the medina allows room for two bicycles to pass - plus a pedestrian, if he’s flattened against the wall. In theory it should be a simple matter to enter the maze of the medina at the Petit Socco and, as long as you continue uphill, to arrive finally at the Kasbah. But over the centuries so many homes and shops have attached themselves to the old palace, like moss on an ancient tree, that it is effectively camouflaged to such an extent that you can walk almost all the way around it without realising.

A visit to the Musée de la Kasbah, the Moroccan art and antique museum, will be enough to convince you that Tangier has probably had almost as many ‘golden eras’ as there were golden fruits in the nearby mythical Gardens of Hesperides. It was here that Hercules slew the hundred-headed dragon that guarded the orchard and so introduced oranges to Greece. An era or two later, British soldiers returned home on leave carrying these same fruits, which they called ‘tangerines.’

The museum guardian will offer you the ubiquitous mint tea and you are free to sit under the fig trees in what was once the Sultan’s private garden and pass an hour in one of the most beautiful and historical places in Tangier. A few years ago this garden was known to ‘old Tangier hands’ as one of the few places in the entire medina where you could escape the town’s hustlers.

The Barbary Corsairs who once plundered Christian ships in the Straits of Gibraltar were, in the twentieth century, replaced by the feared ‘Port Hustlers.’ Travellers from all over the world swapped horror stories about the hustlers of Tangier in awe-stricken voices. But times have changed. Tangier has awoken to the benefits of tourism as illustrated by Marrakech and Fez and the tourist police have managed to do a sensitive and effective job of protecting the visitors. The unofficial guides still exist but, on your politely declining their assistance, they are now more likely to bid you a “Bienvenue, monsieur” than to dog your footsteps until you pay them off.

If you decide that you prefer to visit the medina with a guide it is advisable to hire one from the tourist office who - aside from being more knowledgeable - is less likely to try to drag you through a chain of craft stores.

Nothing in Tangier’s medina is sold at a fixed price. The vendors can recognise the exact figure that they can ask for any particular item merely by an instantaneous evaluation of the prospective customer’s appearance. There is one price for locals and another for tourists. One for tourists in groups and another for back-packers. There is a price for tourists who are passing through and another for those who are staying a few days, or weeks. And, of course, there is a price for a tourist who is accompanied by a guide.

Haggling is one of the social joys. It should always take place with smiles and is never to be hurried. The purchase of a treasured souvenir at a mutually acceptable price - arrived at over a glass or two of mint tea - leaves you with the memory of something far more human than a mere financial transaction.

At the edge of the courtyard, a small doorway leads through the old Portuguese walls onto the Kasbah Lookout. From here you can look down upon a bustling port that saw the comings and goings of Phoenician and Carthaginian traders, Roman galleons, invading Vandal and Visigoth hordes and the warships of all the seafaring nations of Europe.

Standing on the tip of Africa and looking across at Spanish Andalucia you can feel the cooling influence of the Levanter. This is the wind that blows almost constantly through the Strait of Gibraltar and keeps Tangier’s temperature down to a comfortable average even when the rest of Morocco is blistering under the Saharan sun. The Levanter was blowing when the British bombarded the town during their retreat in 1684, and when the Romans declared ‘Tingis’ one of their North African capitals. It may have even been blowing on that legendary day when Hercules pulled the two continents apart from this point. The Levanter was probably taking the sting out of the African sun on that day in 1956 when the International Zone was abolished.

‘Tangier was never the same again,’ lamented Paul Bowles. But every year the port is busier with ferries from Algeciras and Gibraltar and at Ibn Battouta Airport more visitors arrive every day. There are those who say that - inshallah, God willing - Tangier is destined for another golden age.

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