El Jadida
UNESCO World Heritage Site: Portuguese City Of Mazagan, El Jadida (2004), A Early Sixteenth Century Portuguese Sea Fortress Whose Vaulted Underground Cistern Is One Of The Most Photographed Interiors In Morocco · El Jadida, Casablanca-Settat
El Jadida is a working Atlantic port with a small Portuguese sea fortress inside it, and the fortress is why you come. The Portuguese fortified Mazagan from 1514, held it for two and a half centuries as their last foothold in Morocco, and in 1769 blew the defences and sailed away rather than hand them over. What survives is a compact walled town of straight lanes, four bastions, a sea gate and a Gothic church, resettled in the nineteenth century and renamed El Jadida, the new one. Its one famous interior is the Portuguese cistern: a vaulted underground hall where a shallow film of water and a single shaft of light from a hole in the roof turn the columns into a perfect double of themselves. UNESCO listed the walled town in 2004. Outside the ramparts is an ordinary mid-sized Moroccan city, with long beaches on either side and a lagoon coast further south. Honest caveats: the walled town is an hour or two rather than a day, the cistern fills with coach groups and shuts for maintenance without much notice, and the sand closest to town is not the clean sand.
Cite Portugaise, the walled Portuguese town on the Atlantic, with the Gothic cistern inside the ramparts, about 95 km south-west of Casablanca, El Jadida, Casablanca-Settat, Morocco
The walled town is a public neighbourhood, so its lanes, the ramparts walk and the sea gate are open at any hour and cost nothing - late afternoon is the best light on the seaward wall. The cistern keeps museum hours, broadly 09:00 to 18:00 with shorter winter and Ramadan hours and sometimes a midday break, and it closes at short notice for maintenance or for filming, so confirm it the day before if you are travelling for it. The Church of the Assumption opens irregularly, often only when an exhibition is running. Getting there: trains from Casablanca take roughly 1.5-2 hours on a branch line with only a few services a day, coaches and shared grand taxis run far more often, and the drive is about 95 km of motorway and main road. Nothing needs booking here except a room in high summer.