Tétouan

Tetouan sits in a valley under the Djebel Dersa, white against the mountain, and it is the place Al-Andalus went when Spain expelled it. Somewhere between ten and forty thousand Andalusians settled here and in the country around it, and what they brought was not a style but a whole working culture: mudejar plasterwork, embroidery, silverwork, and the habits of a city that had been somewhere else.

The expulsions began on 2 January 1492 and continued in waves into the seventeenth century. The crafts that arrived with them remain named and legible: Tarz Taajira embroidery on cotton and linen in purple, orange and green with Mudejar and Nasrid motifs; and the Tayr, a bird pendant made by Jewish goldsmiths, at its most popular in the eighteenth century. Dar Sanaa was founded in 1919 to preserve and teach those arts, placing embroidery, metalwork, wood and plaster inside one living lineage. The medina's lanes carry that inheritance through workshops, wedding dress and domestic architecture far beyond one museum door.