El Jadida: A Gentle Guide to Morocco's Atlantic Light

Most visitors meet El Jadida in a hurry. A coach pulls up, everyone files down into the famous Portuguese Cistern, takes the photograph of the reflection, and leaves for Marrakech by lunchtime. It is a shame, because the town rewards the opposite approach entirely.

El Jadida sits about 96 km southwest of Casablanca, a working Atlantic port of roughly 237,000 people with a small walled quarter at its edge. That quarter — the Portuguese City, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2004 — is flat, compact and quiet, wrapped in sea air. You can see all of it in an afternoon without once feeling rushed or out of breath.

This is a guide for taking it slowly: what the stones mean, where the steps are, when the light is best, and why a night here beats a stop.

A little history

In 1514 the Portuguese began fortifying a stretch of this coast, and over the following decades built a small walled town they called Mazagan. It was a supply post and a stronghold, laid out with the new Renaissance military thinking of the age: low, thick walls with angled bastions at the corners, designed to deflect cannon fire rather than tower over it.

Mazagan outlasted every other Portuguese holding in Morocco. It was their last position on this coast, finally abandoned in 1769 after a siege by Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah. The Portuguese garrison withdrew and the town stood empty for decades.

It was resettled and rehabilitated in the middle of the 19th century under a new name — El Jadida, "the new" — and grew into a busy trading port with Moroccan, Jewish and European communities living side by side inside and around the old walls. That layering is exactly what UNESCO recognised: not a Portuguese ruin, but a place where two building traditions met and kept working together.

Inside the Portuguese City of El Jadida, the small walled quarter listed by UNESCO.

What to see

Everything below sits inside or beside the walled quarter, within a few hundred metres of one another.

The Portuguese Cistern

This is the reason most people come, and it deserves its reputation. Built in 1514, it was probably a warehouse or armoury first, converted in the 16th century into an underground water reservoir. The chamber is roughly square, about 34 metres on each side, with five rows of five stone pillars holding up low Gothic vaults.

A thin film of water covers the floor, and a single round opening in the roof drops one column of daylight into the middle of it. The vaults double themselves in the reflection and the whole room seems to hang upside down. Orson Welles filmed part of his Othello here, and it is easy to see why. Give it twenty unhurried minutes; the light shifts as the sun moves.

The ramparts and bastions

The walls still run the full circuit of the old town, with bastions at the corners and old cannon still mounted on some of them. From the seaward side you look straight down onto fishing boats and breakwater rocks. It is one of the loveliest slow walks on this coast.

The Church of the Assumption

Built around 1541 and standing a short step from the cistern, this is a rare thing in Morocco: a Portuguese church of the period, plain, high and quietly beautiful inside. It is no longer a working church and is sometimes used for exhibitions.

The old streets and the synagogue

The main lane runs straight from the landward gate to the sea gate, lined with low houses, a few cafés and workshops. The Bensimon Synagogue, inaugurated in 1926, is a reminder of the Jewish community that was central to the port's trading life.

The beaches

The town beach and corniche begin just outside the walls. For something wider and cleaner, Sidi Bouzid lies about 5 km south, with a seafront promenade and small restaurants looking at the Atlantic.

The underground chamber of the Portuguese Cistern, built in 1514, with its five rows of five stone pillars.

A day trip nearby

Azemmour, about 15 km north, is the natural half-day out. It is an old walled town on the bank of the Oum Er-Rbia river, with Portuguese-era ramparts running along the water and a small medina behind them. Over the past years, artists have painted the lanes and walls in blues and bold geometric patterns as part of an annual arts festival, so the old town is now a gentle open-air gallery. It is genuinely small and can be seen in a couple of hours. A taxi there and back is the easy way.

If you would rather go south, Oualidia is roughly 80 km away, about an hour and a half by road. It sits on a sheltered lagoon famous for its oyster beds, farmed here since the late 1950s, and it is the sort of place where lunch takes a long time and nobody minds. That one is best kept as a full day, or as your next stop rather than a return trip.

The town through the year

El Jadida has a mild Atlantic climate rather than a Moroccan inland one. Winters are gentle — January averages around 13–14°C — and summers are warm rather than fierce, with August averaging in the low twenties. Rain falls mostly between November and March, and the annual total is modest.

That means the sticky, exhausting heat of Marrakech or Fez is simply not a problem here. What you get instead is sea wind, which can be brisk, and morning cloud that often burns off by midday.

One date to know: the Moussem of Moulay Abdallah Amghar, held near El Jadida in August. It is a large religious and popular gathering, best known for tbourida — the thundering synchronised horse charges often called fantasia. It is magnificent, and it is also crowded, dusty and loud. Go deliberately, or plan around it.

Honest advice for comfortable travel

• The walled town is flat. This is its great gift. The main lane from gate to gate is level and paved, and the whole quarter is only a few hundred metres across. You will not face the steep, stepped alleys of Chefchaouen or Fez here.
• The cistern means going underground. Expect a stairway down and the same stairway back up, with no lift. The stone is old and the steps are not uniform.
• The cistern floor is wet, and it is dark. That combination is the single real hazard in town. Wear shoes with grip, take the handrail where there is one, and pause at the bottom to let your eyes adjust before you start moving toward the light.
• The ramparts involve steps and uneven stone. The view is worth it, but there is no continuous handrail along the top. If steps are difficult, the walk along the seafront below the walls gives you much of the same drama at ground level.
• Stay inside or beside the old town. There are riads and small hotels within the walls and along the seafront. Choosing one saves you every unnecessary walk of the day.
• Bring a light windproof layer, even in summer. The Atlantic here is cool and the breeze off the water is constant.
• Taxis are the answer for anything beyond the walls. Sidi Bouzid, the port, the train station and Azemmour are all short, cheap rides. Agree the fare before setting off.
• Cafés are everywhere and welcoming. Plan the day around two or three sit-downs rather than one long push.

The vaulted ground-floor hall at the entrance to the Portuguese cistern.

What to eat

This is a fishing port, and it eats like one. The pleasure here is plainness: whole fish from the morning's catch, split, rubbed with chermoula — a green marinade of coriander, garlic, cumin, paprika and lemon — and put straight on charcoal.

Look for grilled sardines, which are cheap, oily and superb; fried calamari; grilled octopus; and fish tagine cooked slowly with tomato, olives and preserved lemon. Oysters appear on many menus, usually from the Oualidia lagoon down the coast, served simply with lemon.

The Marché Central, the old European-style covered market in the newer part of town, is the classic experience: fishmongers on one side, small kitchens on the other that will cook what you have just chosen. It is unpolished and entirely un-touristy. If you prefer a table with a sea view and a menu in French, the corniche and Sidi Bouzid have plenty.

Finish as Moroccans do, with mint tea, or with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice at a café by the walls.

Getting there

El Jadida is one of the easiest small towns in Morocco to reach, and one of the easiest to combine with Casablanca.

Our verdict

El Jadida will not overwhelm you, and that is precisely the recommendation. There is one unforgettable sight, a walled town you can cross in ten minutes, an honest fish lunch and a great deal of Atlantic sky.

For travellers over 60, it is among the most comfortable historic towns in Morocco: level ground, short distances, sea air instead of inland heat, and no need to negotiate a labyrinth. The only real effort is the stairway down into the cistern, and even that is brief.

Give it a night. Walk the walls in the late afternoon when the stone turns gold, eat sardines by the water, and go down to the cistern the next morning when the light is straight overhead and the reflection is at its most perfect.

The Portuguese cistern in El Jadida, Morocco.

“A square room, a shaft of daylight, and five hundred years of water holding the ceiling upside down.”

Photo credits

• Water reflection Portuguese Cistern: Alamrani.a, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• The Portuguese City in El Jadida: El Mehdi Imehda, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Portuguese Cistern 01: Mathew Koshy, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• El Jadida DSCF9300: R Prazeres, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• El Jadida DSCF9139: R Prazeres, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons