Oujda: A Gentle Guide to Morocco's Quiet Eastern Capital

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being a tourist. Hands reaching for your sleeve, prices that change when you open your mouth, the feeling of being a walking wallet. If you have travelled in Morocco before, you know it. And if that memory has made you hesitate about going back, we would like to gently point you east.

Oujda sits in the far northeast of Morocco, about 15 km from the Algerian frontier and some 55 km south of the Mediterranean. It is the capital of the Oriental region and a city of roughly half a million people — and yet almost nobody comes here to sightsee. Visitors are mostly Moroccan families and travellers with roots in the region, coming home. Nobody in the souk has a speech prepared for you.

What that means, in practice, is a Moroccan city you can walk through at your own pace. The old medina is small and flat. The new town has wide pavements and orange trees. People are curious rather than commercial, and the local music — Oujda is a heartland of raï — drifts out of café doorways all afternoon. This is not the Morocco of postcards. It may be the Morocco you actually relax in.

A little history

Oujda was founded in 994 CE by Ziri ibn Atiyya, a chief of the Zenata Berbers, on the natural corridor between the Atlas and the Mediterranean. That corridor made the city: every caravan, army and merchant travelling between Morocco and what is now Algeria passed this way. Oujda changed hands often, and was fortified and rebuilt under the Almoravids and later the Marinids, who left the city its Grand Mosque.

The modern chapter is more bittersweet. French forces occupied Oujda in 1907, and the wide boulevards, arcades and shuttered balconies of the new town date from the decades that followed. After independence the city remained a busy gateway to Algeria — until the land border closed in the 1990s and has stayed closed since.

Understanding that closure explains the mood of Oujda today. A crossroads city with one road suddenly shut behind it turned inward, and became something calmer: a regional capital that lives for itself, its university, its markets and its music, rather than for passing traffic. For a traveller who wants to watch ordinary Moroccan life without being part of a crowd, that is a gift.

Bab El Gharbi, one of the gates of Oujda's medina.

What to see

Oujda's sights are modest in scale and close together, which is exactly what makes the city comfortable. You can see the essentials in a day and a half without ever feeling rushed.

The medina and its gates

The old town is compact, still partly ringed by its ramparts, and entered through a handful of historic gates. The best known is Bab Sidi Abdelouahab, which opens from the new town straight into the alleys. Inside, the lanes are mostly level and wide enough for two people to walk side by side — a real contrast to the steep, stepped medinas of Fez or Chefchaouen. There are no carpet touts. There is, instead, a working market: spices, olives, bread, sandals, bolts of cloth.

Souk El Ma

The old water market is the medina's most atmospheric corner, a small plaza of stalls and covered passages where the region's produce arrives. Look for the blouza, the brightly coloured traditional robe worn by women of the Oriental region — it is the one genuinely local souvenir here.

The Grand Mosque and the old Quranic school

The Jamaa El Kebir, founded in the Marinid period, anchors the medina with its slender minaret. As with mosques across Morocco, the prayer hall is not open to non-Muslim visitors, but the surrounding lanes and the courtyard of the old Quranic school nearby show you the same quiet architecture: whitewash, green tile, a square of sky.

Dar Sebti

A handsome 1930s house built for a merchant from Fez, now a cultural centre and small museum near Place du 16 Août in the new town. Exhibitions and concerts come and go; the building itself, with its courtyard and painted woodwork, is the reason to step in. It is a short, flat walk from most central hotels.

Lalla Aïcha and Lalla Meriem parks

Oujda does public green space better than most Moroccan cities. Lalla Aïcha park, laid out in the 1930s, spreads over some 17 hectares of palms, oaks and fountains with broad level alleys and plenty of benches. Lalla Meriem park is smaller and sits just a few hundred metres from Bab Sidi Abdelouahab — ideal for the shaded sit-down you will want after the souk.

Souk El Ma, the old water market plaza in the medina of Oujda.

An afternoon in the new town

Do not skip the twentieth-century city. The streets around Boulevard Mohammed V and Place du 16 Août are where Oujda actually spends its evenings: arcaded pavements, balconies in a faded colonial style, patisseries, and cafés where half the city seems to be drinking coffee at once.

It is flat, well lit and easy. Pick a café terrace around six in the evening, order a mint tea, and simply watch. Students walking home, families out for ice cream, old men arguing about football. This is the part of Oujda no guidebook lists and every visitor remembers.

If you are here in late July, the Raï Festival of the Oriental fills the city with open-air concerts. It is free and enormously popular — wonderful if you love the music, and worth knowing about if you would rather have quiet nights and easy hotel bookings.

Streets of the old French quarter beside the medina of Oujda.

A day trip nearby

Saïdia, on the Mediterranean, is the obvious escape: roughly 55 to 60 km north of Oujda, about an hour by road, with some 14 km of flat golden sand and a resort marina. Grand taxis and buses run there constantly in summer, and hiring a car with a driver for the day is straightforward. The beach is genuinely wide and level, the promenade is easy walking, and lunch is grilled fish. In July and August it is busy with Moroccan holidaymakers; in June or September you may have long stretches of sand nearly to yourself.

Closer to home, the oasis of Sidi Yahya lies only about 6 km from the centre — a shaded grove of springs and trees around the mausoleum of the city's patron saint, and a place of pilgrimage with a late-summer moussem. The shrines themselves are places of prayer rather than sightseeing; what visitors take away is the shade, the water and the gentle, level stroll. A taxi there and back costs very little.

Honest advice for comfortable travel

• Oujda is flat. The city sits on a plateau at around 470 m, and both the medina and the new town are essentially level. There are no hill climbs, no staircases between neighbourhoods, no cobbled ramps. Of all Morocco's larger cities, this is among the kindest on the knees.
• Stay in the centre. Hotels around Boulevard Mohammed V and Place du 16 Août put you within a flat 10–15 minute walk of the medina gates, Dar Sebti and the parks. You will barely need transport.
• Respect the summer heat. July and August regularly reach the mid-30s Celsius, and the air is dry. If you come then, treat 11am to 5pm as indoor time: this is what cafés and hotel courtyards are for.
• Winter needs a jacket. At this altitude, nights from December to February can be genuinely cold, and older hotels are not always well heated. Ask about heating when you book.
• Medina surfaces are uneven. Level, yes, but with worn paving, occasional drainage channels and no railings. Flat shoes with good grip; a walking stick is perfectly normal here.
• Petits taxis are cheap and everywhere. They are the easy answer to any distance over a kilometre. Agree the fare or ask for the meter before setting off.
• Carry cash. ATMs are plentiful in the new town but small shops, taxis and market stalls are cash-only. The dirham cannot be obtained easily outside Morocco.
• Few people speak English. French and Arabic carry you through, and hotel staff will help. Have your hotel write addresses in Arabic for taxi drivers.
• Bring your own medicines. Pharmacies are good and numerous, but specific brands may not be stocked.

The old walls of Oujda's medina, seen from the mirador.

What to eat

Eastern Morocco cooks a little differently from the tourist coast, and Oujda is the place to taste it.

The local street speciality is karane, a baked flan of chickpea flour and egg, cut into slabs, tucked into bread and dusted with cumin and chilli. It is sold from small hatches and handcarts, eaten standing up, and beloved across the Oriental. Boubbouche — snails simmered in a broth of thyme, anise and liquorice root — are ladled into little bowls on winter evenings; the broth is the point, and you drink it.

In restaurants, look for kefta mcharmla, spiced meatballs in a rich sauce, and the grilled meats that the region does very well. The countryside around Berkane, an hour west, is citrus country, so oranges and clementines in season are exceptional.

For something sweet, the patisseries along the medina's main alley and in the new town sell regional versions of kaab el ghzal, the almond-filled crescent, alongside honeyed pastries and almond cigars. Take them back to a café with a mint tea and you have understood the local rhythm entirely.

Getting there

Our verdict

Oujda will not compete with Marrakech for beauty, and we would not send a first-time visitor to Morocco here. It has no famous riads, no dramatic setting, no single unmissable monument.

What it has is something rarer and, for many travellers over 60, more valuable: a real Moroccan city that is flat, calm, affordable and entirely unbothered by tourism. You can walk its medina without being sold anything. You can sit in a park for an hour and nobody will hurry you. You can eat well for very little, and go to bed early, and wake to the sound of a city getting on with its own life.

Come for two or three unhurried nights — perhaps on the way to or from the Mediterranean at Saïdia — and let Oujda be the gentle part of your trip. Travel does not always have to be spectacular. Sometimes it just needs to be kind.

The old Quranic school at the heart of Oujda's medina.

“In Oujda, nobody is waiting to sell you Morocco — so the city simply hands it to you.”

Photo credits

• Remparts medina Oujda Brahim FARAJI: Farajiibrahim, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Oujda.Bab Al gharbi: Iznassen, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Oujda.medina souk elmaa: User:photo taget from facebook groupe "daralbaraka" without permission. the phot, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Quartier français à l'ancienne médina d'Oujda: Brahim FARAJI, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Oujda.murailles: Iznassen, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• L'ancienne école coranique au centre de la médina d'oujda: Brahim FARAJI, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons