Tangier's Literary Cafés — Mint Tea and the Beat Legacy

Between roughly the 1940s and the 1970s, Tangier acquired a mystique out of all proportion to its size. As an International Zone governed by a committee of foreign powers, it was a place of few rules and cheap living, and it drew a remarkable cast of writers, artists and adventurers who came for a season and stayed for years. They wrote and painted and argued in the city's cafés, and it is those cafés — as much as the medina or the beach — that keep the legend alive today.

You do not need to have read a word of the Beats to enjoy this side of Tangier. The literary trail is really an excuse to sit still in beautiful places: on a terrace over the Strait, or under the fans of a grand old café watching the Ville Nouvelle go by. Ordering a mint tea and lingering is the whole point, and it is the most authentically Tangier thing a visitor can do. The scene has taken on new energy lately as the city smartens up ahead of its turn as a 2030 World Cup host city.

If Tangier has one essential café, it is Café Hafa. Opened in 1921 and clinging to the cliffs of the Marshan district, it is a series of whitewashed terraces stepping down toward the sea, each just wide enough for a few tables and a low wall to lean on. The view is the reason to come: the whole Strait of Gibraltar laid out below, with Spain on the far shore and the ferries crossing between.

Little seems to have changed here in a century. Waiters ferry glasses of hot, sweet mint tea up and down the steps, groups of friends play cards and share pastries, and in the evening the terraces fill with locals and travellers alike waiting for the sun to sink into the water. Its legend rests on the writers and musicians said to have frequented it over the decades, but the everyday magic is simpler than any anecdote: a glass of tea, a cliff, and one of the great views in Morocco. Come in the late afternoon and stay for sunset.

Down in the new town, on the Place de France, the Gran Café de Paris is the other great survivor. Dating from the 1920s, it is a proper European-style grand café of mirrors, banquettes and slow-turning fans, the sort of place where you order a coffee and read a newspaper for an hour. In the mid-century years it was a favourite haunt of the foreign writers who lived nearby, and its faded, formal elegance still evokes the era; film buffs may recognise it as a location in a well-known spy thriller shot in the city.

The Ville Nouvelle around the Place de France is dotted with other historic cafés and terraces, a legacy of the decades when the boulevards were laid out on a French and Spanish model. Wandering here, coffee to coffee, is a gentler counterpoint to the medina, and it is where you feel Tangier's long conversation with Europe most strongly.

Tangier's most famous literary chapter belongs to the Beat Generation. William S. Burroughs settled in the city in the mid-1950s and, in a cheap room at the Villa Muniria, assembled the fragmentary manuscript that became Naked Lunch — a book so bound up with the city that Tangier appears in it, thinly disguised. His friends came to help and to see the place for themselves: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg both spent time here in the late 1950s, part of the restless post-war traffic of writers passing through.

That reputation drew still more of the mid-century avant-garde over the following years, and Tangier became shorthand for a certain kind of bohemian exile. Musicians followed the writers — members of the Rolling Stones famously came to record with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in the Rif foothills nearby — cementing the city's counter-cultural aura. It is a history best absorbed slowly, café by café, rather than ticked off, and the specific tables and rooms are less important than the atmosphere they left behind.

Presiding over all of it was Paul Bowles, the American composer and author of The Sheltering Sky, who made Tangier his home for more than half a century until his death in 1999. More than any other figure, Bowles fixed the city in the Western imagination, and he acted as a kind of host and gatekeeper to the writers, artists and eccentrics who washed up on its shores. His long residence gave the expatriate scene its continuity and much of its myth.

Earlier still, the painters had come for the light. Henri Matisse worked in Tangier in the century's second decade, painting luminous views over the city from a room in one of its grand old hotels, and a line of artists followed him. Between the painters and the writers, Tangier accumulated a cultural weight that its cafés still trade on — and that a new generation of Moroccan and international creatives is now building on afresh.

Tangier's café life is not a museum piece — it is the living rhythm of the city. Cafés open from early morning until late, and they function as living rooms, offices and meeting points. Mint tea, poured theatrically from a height to build a froth, is the classic order, along with strong coffee, fresh orange juice and simple pastries; you take a table, order once, and are welcome to nurse it for as long as you like.

A few gentle norms are worth knowing. Traditional cafés, especially in more conservative corners, can still be male-dominated spaces, though the grand cafés and the terraces of Café Hafa are thoroughly mixed and comfortable for everyone. Tip a few dirhams, dress as you would for a smart European café, and ask before photographing other patrons. For a bite to go with the tea, the seafood grills near the port are close at hand — see the Tangier seafood restaurants guide.

The easiest way to tie the cafés together is a slow afternoon on foot. Start with a coffee at the Gran Café de Paris on the Place de France, wander down through the medina toward the Kasbah, and time your arrival at Café Hafa in the Marshan for the golden hour, when the terraces face the setting sun over the Strait. It is a walk of atmosphere rather than distance, and taxis fill any gaps.

Round it out with the rest of the city's pleasures: the Kasbah and medina walk for history and views, the beaches along the bay for an earlier swim, and, if the mood takes you, a night in one of the atmospheric medina guesthouses so you can do it all again the next day. Tangier rewards the unhurried, and its cafés are where the city teaches you to slow down.