Morocco
Tangier
Mint tea cools on cliff terraces as ships carry the world through Tangier's strait.
Tangier faces Europe across the water and has always traded on it. The medina drops down the hill to the port in stages, the sea wind comes up the streets carrying whatever is being cooked in them, and from the cliff terraces on the western edge you watch ships work the strait all afternoon.
Ba Mohamed opened Cafe Hafa on that cliff in 1921, and its stepped terraces have since held Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, Mohamed Choukri, Sean Connery and the Beatles, with the mint tea unchanged throughout. Up in the kasbah, the sultan's own palace, Dar Al-Makhzen, is now the Museum of Mediterranean Cultures, which is a deliberate framing: the collections are about this sea, not this country. Three thousand square metres of the restored Borj Naam belong to Ibn Battuta, who left Tangier in the fourteenth century and whose journey maps now fill the exhibition.
Solo
Take the kasbah museum first and the café last. The collections explain why this city looks north instead of south, and by the time you get to the terraces as daylight fades you are watching the thing the museum has been describing.
Couple
Let dinner at busy Restaurant Bachir run into an evening descent through the medina lanes towards the water. Order shrimp tagine and fried calamari for the table, then take the long way back uphill.
Friends
Choose Friday for couscous at lunch and go early, then spend the afternoon between Ibn Battuta's route maps and Cafe Hafa's cliff terraces. Pass a pot of mint tea around while ships move through the strait below.
- Cafe Hafa has held its terraces above the water since 1921 and still draws the people it always drew.
- The Kasbah Museum of Mediterranean Cultures occupies the sultan's former palace and collects this sea, not this country.
- Ibn Battuta's interpretation centre fills three thousand square metres of the restored Borj Naam with the maps of his journeys.
- Tangier faces the Strait of Gibraltar where Atlantic and Mediterranean routes meet, giving its medina a permanently northward horizon.
Shrimp tagine and fried calamari to dip in harissa at Restaurant Bachir off Ave Pasteur, and Friday is couscous if you get there early enough.
Mint tea on the stepped terraces of Cafe Hafa, poured the same way since 1921, with the ships going past below you.
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