Chefchaouen, also known as the Blue City, is located in the Rif Valley in northern Morocco. It is considered one of the most beautiful cities in Morocco due to its coloring. Houses, walls, doors, windows, fountains, and even streets are painted blue. Founded in 1471, Chefchaouen has been regarded for many centuries as an inviolable and sacred place where foreigners are not allowed.

History of the city of Chefchaouen

The ancient part of the city reflects the typical style of Andalusia, which is not surprising since its population originally consisted of exiled Andalusians, Muslims and Jews who came here in search of a safe place to live. Even today, the majority of the people of Chavin still speak Spanish. Off the list of traditional tourist destinations until the 1950s, Chefshaven (that's the city's full name) is today a haven for photographers as well as hashish smokers thanks to the cultivation of cannabis, which is legal only in these valleys of Morocco, employing hundreds of people. The amount of hash produced in this area corresponds to 40% of world production - more than 80% of cannabis from Morocco is supplied to Europe. Chavin farmers are among the earliest producers of this banned substance.

Speculation about the blue hues used in the coloring of the old city continues to this day. Some say it is the work of Jewish refugees who associate this key with heaven. Others argue that it's just an aesthetic choice and that blue is great for repelling mosquitoes. In any case, the charming city of Chefchaouen, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a testament to the fusion of the Andalusian world and the Moroccan world. A real pearl of bluish luster, carefully restored and carefully guarded in the Rif mountain range. It is also one of the most beautiful cities in Morocco, not inferior in beauty to other cities of color in the world.

Old City Chefchaouen

Shopping in this beautiful blue city is one of its biggest attractions. It may not be as varied or grand as big cities like Fez, Marrakesh and Casablanca, but Chefchaouen boasts traditional charm. After you've explored the blue maze of streets, consider buying some traditional souvenirs. Tourists will enjoy the relaxed atmosphere that is hard to find in big cities. Here you can stroll at your leisure and appreciate the local leather goods for which Chefshaven is so famous.

Behind the blue streets of Chavin, a natural landscape spreads out, surrounding the city from all sides and making it even more picturesque. Approximately 30 minutes by taxi from the city center, there is an enticing hiking trail that, after a short walk, leads to stunning waterfalls. The pristine blue waters match the city's blue theme, and visitors can take a dip in the rock pools or marvel at the majestic streams. In this area, you should definitely visit the famous Bridge of God - a stone arch crossing the river.

In the center of Chefchaouen lie the beautiful Andalusian Gardens, a tranquil green oasis that complements an already tranquil blue stream. In these gardens, it is worth visiting the Ethnographic Museum, known as the Kasbah Museum, which invites visitors to explore its unrivaled collection of artifacts. They will tell you the history of Chavin in a variety of manifestations, from ceramics to musical instruments. Moreover, the museum even has a small art gallery. A visit to the museum will allow you to learn about the history and culture of this beautiful city, appreciate the aesthetics and traditions.

Every city has its own area, and Shefshaven is no exception. In the heart of the old city is Uta el Hammam Square, famous for its atmosphere, where Arab and Spanish influences intersect. This can be seen in fantastic cuisine, from street food to restaurants. The central point of Chefchaouen is great for relaxing and contemplating the majestic mountains. It's also a place for people-watching in the heart of the city's activity.

The sky tones of the streets in the Moroccan city of Chefchaouen (Shevshaven, Chaouen, Chefchaouen) seem like a fabulous scenery. The color palette of the rising medina is replete with piercing shades of blue, blue and azure. The city, where the walls of buildings, window frames, wooden doors of houses, steps and even flower pots are filled with blue, is one of the largest tourist centers in northern Morocco. Saturated shades of blue azure, turning into blue and purple tones, are updated several times a year. Residents of Chefchaouen paint buildings anew before major holidays and festivals that take place in the city several times a year.

Shaven, founded in 1471 as a fortress to protect against Portuguese invaders, owes such color monotony to the local Jewish community. The city became one of the largest refuges for Jews expelled from Spain during the Reconquista. According to biblical precepts, the blue and blue shades of houses should symbolize the prayer cover of the tallit (tales) and remind of God. The Jewish population of Shaven has decreased significantly since the 15th century, but the locals have retained the tradition of painting buildings in heavenly tones.

You can stay in Chefchaouen for a few days. In addition to walking around the medina and visiting the city museum, it is worth taking time to travel along the Er Rif (Ter Rif) mountain range encircling the city. The old part of the "blue city" is quite small - and you can walk along the narrow streets without a guide, but it is better to go on an excursion to the mountains with one of the local guides. A walk around the neighborhood traditionally begins north of the medina - from the famous source of Ras al-Ma, which supplies the whole city with fresh water.

In April and May, Chefchaouen is especially picturesque. Flowers bloom all over the city, the various shades of which contrast incredibly colorfully with the blue, azure and blue walls of the houses.

How to get there

The nearest major transport center to Chefchaouen - the city of Tangier - is located 85 kilometers to the north-west. You can also get to the "blue city" from Fes, Meknes, Casablanca, Rabat and other major tourist centers of Morocco.

Bus service is provided by the transport company CTM, whose flights connect Chefchaouen with Fez and Meknes (travel time - four hours; ticket price - 70 MAD (~ $ 7.0)), Casablanca (travel time - five and a half hours; bus departs daily at 13:15; ticket price - 120 MAD (~ $ 12.0)), Rabat (travel time - four hours; bus leaves daily at 14:45; ticket price - 90 MAD (~ $ 9.0)). You can get from Tangier with a change in Tetouan (total travel time - a couple of hours; ticket price - about 45 MAD (~ $ 4.5)).

There are no direct bus routes connecting Chefchaouen with Agadir and Marrakesh. The best way to get there is with a change in Casablanca. Tickets can be purchased in advance at the stations or on the CTM website. The bus station of Chefchaouen is located at a small distance from the medina, at the bottom of the slope.

Location

Chefchaouen lies at the foot of the Rif mountain range, in the northwest.

Photographer Anastasia Kolesnikova told PRTBRT about her two-week trip to Morocco.

We all love to travel and often start from well-trodden popular routes. But is everyone ready to go to a country far from the usual tourist attractions? Giant canyons, hot endless Sahara, a blue city of incredible beauty, waterfalls, snowy Atlas Mountains, a wild and friendly Oasis and much more! All this is Morocco.

Route

Casablanca - Chefchaouen - Fes - Er Rachidia - Merzouga - Ouarzazate - Marrakesh - Sidi Ifni (Legzira) - Essaouira - Casablanca. All this took 16 days.

Visa: You can stay in Morocco without a visa for up to 90 days.
Air travel: Direct air travel is operated by Royal Air Maroc, but with transfers it will be much cheaper.
Housing: Often when people hear "travel all over Morocco", they ask themselves: how is this possible? How did you find the right accommodation? For some reason, most people represent this country as an undeveloped Arab hole. In reality, the opposite is true.

The Kingdom of Morocco is very well prepared for travelers and is always happy to host them anywhere in the country. We searched for accommodation through Booking, Airbnb and directly on the spot. All options turned out to be very good and profitable. It is quite difficult to choose something special, because each city had its own flavor. We wanted to stay in traditional places where everything is saturated with the spirit of an African country. No five-star hotels filled with monotonous boring furniture and perfect service.

Car rent: We rented a car right at the Casablanca airport. Our requirements were modest: a good ride, roomy luggage, GPS, music and low fuel consumption. It turned out to be difficult to withstand the first Moroccan bargaining: we spent an hour in the closet! From 30 thousand rubles (approximately 5700 dirhams) they bargained for 20 thousand plus 6 thousand rubles for the navigator. GPS with a flooded map of the country is an absolutely necessary thing here, especially in cities. Even the best paper maps of Morocco do not shine with details - getting lost in the center is not worth anything. And the names of the streets are not customary to write here. ( If you do not want to spend money on a navigator, then download the Maps.me application in advance. - Approx. ed.)

National cuisine: The main national dish is tagine. This word means both the dishes and the dish cooked in it. What is a tagine? Clay pot with a high conical lid. It is very hermetic, due to this, no steam escapes during cooking, and no aroma is even felt. Therefore, the taste is rich and bright. Tagine can be of three types: chicken, fish and lamb meat. Without fail, the table is served with olives (sometimes several types) and a bread cake. The set lunch also includes soup, vegetable salad, dessert and drinks (both hot and cold).
Couscous is a well-known dish in Moroccan cuisine; it is usually served hot at the end of a meal. It is made from cereals and olive oil, the ingredients are stewed in a thick-walled cauldron with the addition of vegetables, raisins and lentils. Couscous is served with fragrant ksra flatbread. Drinks - aromatic green tea with fresh mint.

Casablanca

The main attraction of Casablanca is the Hassan II Mosque. The building stands on a ledge that is washed by the Atlantic Ocean. It is the largest mosque in the country and the seventh largest in the world. With a minaret 210 meters high, it is the tallest religious building in the world. A laser is installed at the top of the minaret, the light from which is directed to Mecca.
Our first accommodation in Morocco exceeded all expectations: an Airbnb booking turned into a huge apartment, hospitable hosts and a laid table with treats. Here we were treated to Moroccan tea. It is drunk from small glass piles. The locals pour it from a high-lifted silver teapot.

Chefchaouen

Azure steps, cornflower blue shutters, turquoise flower pots and blue houses - this is Chefchaouen, the city where the sky has settled! You only need to walk around the city on foot, no transport will let you feel all the beauty of this place. And the roads here are narrow and paved. The walk should start from the central square of the Old Town, where the main monuments are concentrated. From the terraces of the cafe you can admire the view of the city, and the red sandstone fortress, and the mosque with an octagonal minaret, and the panorama of the majestic mountains.

In Chefchaouen we booked a riad - a traditional Moroccan house or palace. Riads usually have a patio with a garden, from where natural light penetrates into all rooms of the house. The interior of the blue riad Riad Nerja Chaouen is amazing: living rooms with cozy soft sofas and subdued light, soft carpets on the floor, friendly staff, excellent clean rooms. All this pleasure cost us about 6 thousand rubles for two nights from four.
Interesting fact: In the evenings, you will definitely meet locals selling marijuana. Chefchaouen is Morocco's leader in the cultivation of hemp, which the locals call chocolate. They grow it here for industrial purposes, and this does not affect the criminal situation in any way.

Fes

Five or six hours drive - and we find ourselves in the former capital of Morocco, Fez.
Fez is the third largest city in Morocco and has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. It is the embodiment of the history of the country and its spiritual and religious capital. And here are the world-famous dyers (Moulay Abdellah Quarter). They smell, as they say in all guidebooks, disgusting. But the Moroccans immediately give a bunch of mint at the entrance to somehow beat off the smells hovering around you. Entrepreneurial store owners will easily let you in so that you can look at the dyers from above for free. They expect you to buy something in return.

Fez has an excellent market (Medina of Fez) with a lot of handicrafts: dishes and carpets. Trading is required!

Be careful wandering the streets of Fes. They are full of secret passages that create real labyrinths, from which it will take a long time to get out. Therefore, we recommend finding a Moroccan guide. He will tell you about the city and guide you to the right places. You can find it in the city center.

Merzouga and the Sahara Desert

One of the goals of the whole trip is to look at the Sahara Desert, which is 500 kilometers through the Atlas Mountains. The road from Fez to Merzouga is one of the most beautiful and varied I have ever traveled: cedar forests soon gave way to Martian landscapes, red-brown slovenly villages, then mountainous snowy ridges, by morning - rocky valleys with palm oases. Sometimes I got the impression that you were not in Africa, but somewhere in Norway or Iceland. And just before the desert, everything changed again and became golden. Merzouga is the gateway to the Sahara for travelers, it was here that we felt like real heroes of an oriental fairy tale: wrapped in blankets from Fez, we sat by the fire on a dune and drank tea. By morning, the light of the sun slowly painted the sand pink, and the dunes towered hundreds of meters above us in warm graceful lines.
We also rented accommodation here on Airbnb - modestly Berber, but inexpensive and five minutes by car to the dunes. There were even camels and a donkey grazing in the yard!

Todra Gorge

The Todra Gorge, formed in the High Atlas Mountains, is well known to European rock climbers who hone their skills here. The river created the canyon, leaving at its narrowest point only ten meters wide between 300-meter vertical walls.
Palm oases invariably accompany any settlement here, successfully diluting the monotonous ocher color with greenery.

Film Studio Atlas Corporation

The route lies in Ouarzazate and the film studio Atlas Corporation. It is considered one of the largest in the world. In the Atlas, parts of Cleopatra's castle, the temple of Ra and Set, the huts of the Arabs, parts of Jerusalem, the Coliseum prison, Ali Baba's house and courtyard were erected in real size.

Walking around the film studio is an amazing thing: all the time you want to climb either on the stone block of a giant staircase, or on the roof of a rural house, from which, as in life, a second house has already grown, then you want to scatter and do somersaults, as in The Matrix , pushing off a giant stone column ... There is only one thing: all objects look very realistic, but in fact they are made of artificial materials and are very fragile.
Films shot in this film studio: "Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Gladiator", "Alexander", "Troy", "Clone", "Star Wars", "Babylon", "The Man Who knew too much”, “Kingdom of Heaven”, “The Last Temptation of Christ”, “Alexander the Great” and others.

Ouarzazate and Ait Ben Haddou

This ancient city is woven from dozens of kasbahs - clay fortresses of various heights, each of which is crowned with a battlement tower and decorated with openwork ornaments. Numerous round arches and narrow passages connect winding streets and create a complex labyrinth. On the slope itself, forming multi-tiered terraces, dwellings with flat roofs sheltered.
The valley of the Ouarzazate River runs through the desert, the river begins on the southern slopes of the High Atlas and is further lost in the sands of the Sahara. Red adobe kasbahs are surrounded by green palm groves - like a movie theater! And in fact, filmmakers do not miss the opportunity to use the unique natural scenery for filming: even if you have never been to Morocco before, the view of Ait Ben Haddou may be familiar to you from dozens of films.
Ksar has been and remains extremely popular as a filming location for films that use oriental scenes to one degree or another. "Lawrence of Arabia", "The Man Who Wanted to Be King", "Jesus of Nazareth", "Time Bandits", "The Pearl of the Nile", "Sparks from the Eyes", "The Last Temptation of Christ", "Under the Cover of Heaven" were filmed here. , "Mummy", "Gladiator", "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time".

Marrakesh

The main attraction of the city is the central square of Jemaa el Fna, for which tourists from all over the world come here. This is the heart of the city, which lives 24 hours a day. The smell of dried apricots and spices, fresh orange juice, the cries of fortune-tellers, dancers, speakers, healers, beggars, tattoo artists, snake charmers with cobras, hundreds of people. All this will drag you into the whirlpool right here.

Nothing interesting happens in the square in the morning. It all starts after lunch. People begin to gather on the square, hastily set up pavilions, set up roughly knocked together benches and tables, roll out boilers and begin the nightly action. The entire center of the huge square is transformed into an open-air kitchen. Here you can taste delicious meshui - tender and very juicy meat, which is fried on coals for several hours; tagine - lamb stewed in a special clay pot; Hariru is a thick, rich tomato soup with lentils and lemon. After sunset, the entire area is shrouded in clouds of steam and smoke, hundreds of small fireflies begin to burn.

Chefchaouen is a small city in northwestern Morocco, on the slopes of the Rif mountain range. The city is known for its architecture, delicious food, and the fact that most of the buildings in it are painted in different shades of blue, from almost blue to white. 35 thousand people live in Chefchaouen.

A traveler named Mad Polpo visited the city and shares his observations:

Chavin is only two hours from Tangier. On the picturesque hills, where olive trees grow, wild goats run and bees buzz…

The city was founded in 1471 on the site of a Berber settlement to protect northern Morocco from the Portuguese. Later, Spanish Muslims and Jews settled here, who formed appearance Chefchaouen on the samples of his native Andalusia.

Despite the fact that Chefchaouen is small, like any Mediterranean town, it is quite noisy. It's easy to get lost in the city's alleys - all the houses are painted in shades of blue, from the base of the walls to the roofs.

Immediately after its foundation, the city was declared a sacred place and closed for centuries to non-believers on pain of death. At the same time, Chefchaouen retained its medieval appearance. In 1912, Spanish troops entered Chefchaouen, opening it to the outside world.

No one knows where the blue color came from. But there are a few guesses. Some say that this is a tribute to the Mediterranean, but the sea from Chefchaouen is 30 kilometers away. Others that the city was painted blue - the color of the water, in honor of the spring in the surrounding hills, which feeds not only Chefchaouen, but the entire region. Thirdly, the Jews were the first to paint the city: in Judaism, the blue color symbolizes paradise.

In 1956, the independence of Morocco was proclaimed and Chefchaouen was the last city where the Spanish flag was lowered. Many of its inhabitants speak Spanish, and the city itself is popular with tourists from Spain.

There are other versions… Locals believe that the blue color repels mosquitoes, which are numerous here. The color of the building resembles water, and insects do not like it. From afar, the city generally does not look like a small lake. Or simply that blue is a pleasant color that doesn't irritate and also doesn't reflect as much sunlight. By the way, hemp fields grow around Chavin. Do you need some more peace of mind?