Marruecoo blog: Morocco holidays..Tangier Vacations

Morocco holidays..Tangier Vacations

For the first half of the twentieth century TANGIER was one of the stylish resorts of the Mediterranean – an international city with its own laws and administration, plus an eclectic community of exiles, expatriates and refugees. Tangier was also the world's first and most famous gay resort – favoured by the likes of Tennessee Williams, Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams – a role it maintains to a lesser degree today. The ghosts of these times left a slight air of decay about the city, still tangible in the older hotels and bars. Until recently Tangier's tourism future didn't look too rosy, as it had gained a reputation as somewhere to avoid or, at best, only as a transit point for onward travel.
Tangier's port, recently re-named Tanger-Ville and ranked second only to Casablanca, is central to its economic future. The now constant stream of ferries arriving daily – nearly around the clock during the August holidays – has prompted the construction of another, goods-only port, Tanger Mediterranée, 20km from Ceuta on the Atlantic coast and financed by the private sector, which will eventually leave Tanger-Ville a passenger-only port.
Tangier's interest and attraction lies in the city as a whole: its café life, beach, and the tumbling streets of the Medina. The handful of "monuments", with the notable exception of the Dar el Makhzen palace, are best viewed as adding direction to your wanderings, rather than as unmissable sights.
Finally, despite the clear-out of most of its hustlers, Tangier is still a tricky place for first-time arrivals – hustling and mugging stories here should not be discounted and the characters you run into at the port are as objectionable as any you'll find in Morocco – but once you get the hang of it, Tangier is lively and very likeable, highly individual and with an enduring eccentricity.

Located on the Strait of Gibraltar where Africa meets Europe, Tangier has long held strategic importance. Ruled through the centuries by waves of conquerors including Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs and Portuguese, the city is more than two and a half millennia old, making it one of North Africa's most ancient. The medina, kasbah, bazaars and souks are among the country's most vibrant, and the beaches are excellent. In the last century, Tangier became a hot spot for the internation
al jet set.

Do you want to know where exactly your accommodation is located in Tangier? Then check the map of Tangier below. The map will show you 40 accommodations at most.

Tangier (UK: /tænˈdʒɪə/, US: /tænˈdʒɪr/; Berber: Tanja or (archaic) Tingi, Arabic: طنجة‎ Ṭanjah) is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 (2012 estimates). It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. It is the capital of the Tangier-Tetouan Region and of the Tangier-Asilah prefecture of Morocco.
The history of Tangier is very rich due to the historical presence of many civilizations and cultures starting from the 5th century BC. Between the period of being a Berber settlement and then a Phoenician town to the independence era around the 1950s, Tangier was a refuge for many cultures. In 1923, Tangier was considered as having international status by foreign colonial powers, and became a destination for many European and American diplomats, spies, writers and businessmen.
The city is currently undergoing rapid development and modernization. Projects include new 5-star hotels along the bay, a modern business district called Tangier City Center, a new airport terminal and a new football stadium. Tangier's economy is also set to benefit greatly from the new Tanger-Med port.
Tangier's sport team I.R.T. (or Ittihad Riadi de Tanger) is a prominent football club with a large following base. Tangier will be one of the host cities for the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations football tournament, which shall be played at the new Ibn Batouta Stadium and in other cities across Morocco.

lenty of places have been mythologized over the years as glamorous bastions of ill repute, but Tangier in the Forties and Fifties was one of the few that actually lived up to its bad name. Part of an international zone on the North African coast that was officially ruled by nine nations, the city was effectively governed by none of them—so its habitués could get away with things they’d never attempt back home. Spies and arms dealers gathered in seedy cafés; aging Englishmen entertained offers from Arab boys; American heiress Barbara Hutton hosted drug-fueled parties at her house in the casbah. But after the city was incorporated into Morocco in 1956, the expats started to drift away, taking much of the excitement with them, and Tangier became known as a shabby port town, a place you hurried through on your way to Fez or Ouarzazate.
Now, however, the city is on the upswing again, luring a new crowd of in-the-know Europeans as well as a massive influx of government spending, courtesy of Morocco’s young king, Mohammed VI (his conservative father, Hassan II, hated Tangier for its decadent reputation and neglected it for decades). And although the talk among expats these days is more likely to be about scoring good hydrangeas than good hashish, the town still retains much of its gritty, idiosyncratic appeal. Longtime locals are hopeful that Tangier will never be like Morocco’s reigning tourist mecca, Marrakesh, which has lately begun to suffer from its own success, as foreign buyers transform every available corner of the souk into neo-Moorish boutique hotels and British partyers arrive en masse via low-cost fares from London. For many Europeans, Tangier is an ideal under-the-radar alternative, straddling the line between boomtown and ghost town.
“Tangier is one of those cities you either love or despise. I, of course, love it,” says Paris social doyenne Betty Lagardère, who has been renting a summer place here for several years and recently decided to buy. Seated in the back of her chauffeur-driven SUV and dressed in a custom linen djellaba, Lagardère explains that she was drawn to Tangier by the same North African light that captivated Matisse and the same cross-cultural mix that drew composer and writer Paul Bowles, who lived here from 1947 until his death in 1999. “It’s such a mysterious place,” she says. “To understand it, you have to look behind its doors.”
Indeed, Tangier’s charms might not be instantly obvious to first-time visitors: Touring its main public areas, which the city is feverishly renovating in a bid to host the 2012 International Exposition, is a bit like meeting an octogenarian who’s just had her first facelift. But the changes completed in the past year alone have made a dramatic difference. “See those gardens? New,” says Lagardère as we speed past a freshly planted town square. “That fountain? New. A year ago this street was covered in garbage.”

Morocco:

Tangier, Morocco.

View of the beach and the Medina (old town), where Paul Bowles and William Burroughs wrote their masterpieces. Also the home at one time to virtually every international scoundrel.