Tangier

Where it sits. Tangier stands at the western mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar, on hills above a bay that faces north-east toward Spain, 14 km away at the narrowest crossing. Cape Spartel, 23 km west of the centre, marks the corner where the Atlantic gives way to the Mediterranean; the city's fortunes have always come from that hinge. The medina climbs the slope in tight lanes to the kasbah on the western hill, while the twentieth-century ville nouvelle spreads inland and the beach runs east along the bay toward Cape Malabata. On a clear morning the Spanish coast and the Rock are plainly visible from the kasbah terrace.

The story behind it. Roman Tingis gave its name to the province of Mauretania Tingitana. Portugal held the town, then England acquired it as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1661 and abandoned it in 1684, destroying the mole on the way out. The defining modern chapter began with an international convention signed in Paris on 18 December 1923, which placed Tangier and 373 km² around it under joint French, Spanish and British administration. By the mid-1930s roughly 50,000 people lived in the zone. Its legal peculiarity made it a haven for currency speculators, smugglers, intelligence officers and writers in equal measure, and a place where Moroccan independence activists could meet in relative safety. The zone was wound up after the Tangier Protocol of 29 October 1956. Paul Bowles stayed on for half a century; William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch here and called its setting Interzone; Matisse painted from the Grand Hôtel Villa de France; Mohamed Choukri wrote the city from the inside.

On screen. Tangier is one of the most heavily used doubling cities in North Africa, and three productions define its reputation:

• The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) staged its central set piece here — the rooftop run across the medina, the leap through a window and the close-quarters fight in an apartment — with Pinewood as the production base and Tangier as the only location that could deliver that density of low roofs.
• Inception (2010) used Tangier as Mombasa, where Cobb recruits Eames and Yusuf; the alley chase in which Cobb is squeezed between two walls was shot in the medina, and the riot in the film's first dream layer was also filmed in the city.
• Spectre (2015) brought the unit to Morocco in June 2015 for work in Tangier, Oujda and Erfoud; the hotel L'Américain sequence is Tangier, and the desert base is the eroded horseshoe ridge of Gara Medouar in the south-east, where the closing explosion used 8,140 litres of kerosene and 24 charges of a kilogram each — a Guinness record for the largest film stunt explosion.

Bertolucci also filmed The Sheltering Sky (1990) from Bowles's novel here, with Bowles himself appearing in a café as the narrator.

What you actually see today. The kasbah holds the Dar el Makhzen, the former governors' palace, now a museum of Mediterranean cultures, with a courtyard of zellij and a small archaeological collection. Below it the Petit Socco keeps its two rows of old cafés, and the Grand Socco — officially Place du 9 Avril 1947 — is anchored by the Cinéma Rif, a 1938 art deco cinema restored and reopened in 2006 as the Cinémathèque de Tanger, which now runs a film archive and repertory programme in a city that mostly lost its cinemas. Café Hafa, terraced down the Marshan cliff since the 1920s, still serves mint tea over the strait. The American Legation in the medina is the only United States National Historic Landmark abroad and holds a wing of Bowles material. Off the Grand Socco, the Mendoubia gardens shelter a vast old dragon tree and a museum of the anti-colonial resistance, while the Librairie des Colonnes on Boulevard Pasteur has sold books to the city's writers since 1949. The Grand Hôtel Villa de France still shows the room from whose window Matisse painted the view over the English church and the bay in 1912.

Getting there and timing. The Al Boraq high-speed line, opened in November 2018, runs to Casablanca in a little over two hours and to Rabat in about ninety minutes. Ferries cross from Tarifa in roughly an hour to the city port; freight and most Spanish car traffic use Tanger Med, 40 km east. Ibn Battouta airport lies 12 km south-west. April to June and September to October are the pleasant months; August is chaotic with the returning diaspora; winter brings Atlantic gales through the strait. Cape Spartel's 1864 lighthouse and the Caves of Hercules make an easy half-day west of town. Expect stairs, steep lanes and uneven cobbles throughout the medina.