Chefchaouen, Morocco

Welcome to Chefchaouen, also known as the Blue City, located in the northwest region of Morocco. This charming city is noted for its buildings painted in shades of blue, which gives it a unique and picturesque appearance. Chefchaouen was founded as a military outpost shortly before the Spanish Reconquista of Granada, and its population grew quickly with Muslim and Jewish immigrants fleeing from Spain. Today, the city’s economy is based on a traditional agro-pastoral system with olive and fig plantations, handicrafts sector focusing on leather, iron, textiles, and carpentry, and summer-dominated tourism. The name Chefchaouen is of Tarifit or Tamazigh origin, derived from the word isakon or echaouen which means the horns, and the word chef which means look at. Chefchaouen thus means look at the horns, reflecting the two mountain peaks overlooking the area. The city is also called Chaouen by the inhabitants of the northern region. Chefchaouen has maintained strong relations with the inhabitants of the Jbala Region such as Akhmas, Ghomara, Ghazaoua, and Sanhaja tribes, particularly in terms of trade. The traditional houses of Chefchaouen were made of stone, brick, tile, wood, soil, and lime. Each house had an open yard in the center surrounded by corridors and bedrooms. The yards are often decorated with fruit trees such as oranges, lemons, berries, and grapes, as well as some perfumed shrubs including night-blooming jessamine (Cestrum nocturnum) and jasmine (Jasminum officinale). From a physiognomy perspective, the city is influenced by Andalusian architecture, such as the curved brick archways that strengthen the houses and decorate the narrow blue alleyways, the traditional water network, and the landscaping and care of plants inside houses and mosques. From a cultural perspective, many Chefchaouen families have conserved the art of Andalusian music, which has become the main ritual of Chefchaouen religious festivals and social ceremonies. The rural landscape was characterized by a distribution of space according to intra- and intertribal relations. At the level of each dshar (low-density rural settlements), the houses are built around a mosque or a marabou and occupy the center of the concentric spatial structure of traditional agro-sylvo-pastoral systems. This spatial distribution of dshars is tightly associated with arable land and availability of water resources, with shifting cultivation limited to a diffuse strip of matorral shrubland and pasture that mark the transition to forests. However, this traditional agro-salvo-pastoral system has been deeply affected by multiple processes of modern socio-cultural and economic transformation. Chefchaouen is located at about 600 metres (2,000 ft) above sea level in the foothills of the Kaʻala mountain in the western part of the Rif mountain range, in northwestern Morocco. The province of Chefchaouen is among the largest in Morocco, with an area of 3,443 km2 (1,329 sq mi). It is bordered by five provinces – Tétouan Province to the northwest, Larache Province to the west, Al Hoceïma Province to the east, Taounate Province to the south, Ouezzane Province to the southwest – and the Mediterranean Sea to the northeast. The Province of Chefchaouen belongs to the Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima Region and consists