The urban maze of Tangier

Tangier is a strange beast. The streets curl and writhe like a Lovecraftian tentacle, oblivious to geometry or reason. Google Maps gives up halfway through the first alley, surrendering to the timeless chaos.

I walk along the alleys in the old Medina, under the watchful gaze of old men sipping their tea, blending in like Moby Dick at a Nine Inch Nails concert.

Entering the Medina from Grand Socco through the keyhole gate Bab Fass.

It’s been a decade since my last visit in Morocco and this time I’m following in the footsteps of spies, poets and the terminally lost. Tangier has always been a magnet for the mad, the brilliant, the broken. Paul Bowles came for the exotic decay. William S. Burroughs came for the drugs. The spies came for the anonymity.

No wonder that the city is frequently featured together with movie characters such as Jason Bourne (Bourne Ultimatum), James Bond (both Spectre and Living Daylights had scenes in the city) and Dom Cobb (Inception, where the city acted as “Mombasa, Kenya”).

Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in the Hotel el-Muniria during the 1950s. The rough Tangier he describes, the “interzone” as he named it, may not exist anymore. But once you leave the open space of the Grand Socco and head into the alleys of the Medina through the keyhole gate Bab Fass, the reality is quickly blending into fiction.

Retracing footsteps at Petit Socco.

The whitewashed walls of the Medina rise like ghosts above the harbor, whispering secrets in Arabic, French and the slow drawl of fading Spanish colonialists. The Petit Socco is the old heart of Tangier. Even the Romans had their forum here and all who goes to Tangier will pass through sooner or later.

Today there is not much to do at Petit Socco except to join the expats at Café Tingis, sipping mint tea so sweet your bloodstream will rumble. I remember watching Michael Palin’s series Sahara many years ago, where he passed the square in 2002 and had a stop at Café Tingis. Anthony Bourdain did the same in 2013. And now I’m here.

Hustle and bustle in the souk.

After his visit to Tangier in 1867, Mark Twain wrote:

“Tangier is a foreign land if ever there was one, and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save The Arabian Nights. Here is a packed and jammed city enclosed in a massive stone wall which is more than a thousand years old. All the houses nearly are one-and two-story, made of thick walls of stone, plastered outside, square as a dry-goods box, flat as a floor on top, no cornices, whitewashed all over — a crowded city of snowy tombs!”

A lot of things can change in 150 years, but there are still exciting sights waiting around every corner and my bucket list is long. Unfortunately the Medina has a mindset of its own regarding time and space. And for a brief moment, amid the chaos, the labyrinth starts to make sense. Not logically, but emotionally. This is Tangier: brutal, beautiful and utterly indifferent to any plans you make.