Tangier ..
Some seventeenth century grooms would be perfectly happy with a goat or two or even a bottle of top shelf malt whisky as their dowry, but when he married Catherine of Braganza, Charles II got Tangier as part of the package deal. Before that the city had been passed from empire to empire more often than a three pound note, along the way acquiring, like Casablanca, Marrakesh and Fez, a reputation for the exotic and the romantic.

This reputation was only enhanced when, in the 1920s, it became an international zone hosting eight countries, three languages, two currencies and a barrel load of illegal high jinks. This wild playground of permissiveness was a siren call to the 1950s literary riff-raff who promptly turned their backs on the white-picket-fence-and-apple-pie life and went to smoke hashish and drink themselves stupid in the hot spicy city sandwiched between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

Today, Tangier is a lot less disreputable but a lot more aware of the value of the tourist dollar but don't let the hordes of tourist hustlers and pickpockets put you off. It still retains its faded mongrel charm - not entirely Moroccan, European or African but a heady mix of all three - and the old world of the bazaar is still intact in the form of the Grand Socco with its makeshift shops, snake charmers, musicians and storyteller.

Built on the slope of a hill, Tangier overhangs the ocean and is divided into several parts: the port mainly intended for the traffic of passengers, the beach, which wraps around a large part of the city and where Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean meet, and the medina and the modern city.

Visit the white-walled Kasbah and the Sultan's Garden with its Moorish fountain, fragrant herbs and shrubs, and orange and lemon trees. What better place to relax than the harem-coolness of the Kasbah, and at the end of the day soak up that erotic Moroccan liquid light that French painter Delacroix painted over and over again and that makes an appearance in every love story set in the Middle East.

Cadiz , Ceuta , Cordoba , Gibraltar , Granada , Grazalema Natural Park , Istan , Malaga , Marrakesh , Mijas Pueblo , Morrocco , Ojen , Ronda , Seville , Tangier ,
Tarifa ,

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