Pretty City: Chefchaouen

Inconvenient to reach but all the more attractive when you arrive, Chefchaouen is among the most photographed towns in Morocco for a good reason: it’s blue.

Like, really blue.

For reasons not reliably documented, people started painting their houses and businesses a eye-popping shade of cerulean a hundred years ago, and now the historic heart of the city is entirely blue. Walls, sidewalks, doors, passageways… blue, blue, blue, blue. The shades range from pastel robin’s egg to a deep, saturated royal. The collective effect is so striking that even when viewed from a distance on the highway, Chefchouen looks blue. The eastern flank of town is marked by a quick-moving river that cascades over rocks and terraces, making a cool spot to relax with mint tea and enjoy the sound of rushing water.

Chefchaouen was also my last chance at hiking before leaving Morocco. The town itself is built on steep hillside, not unlike Moulay Idriss; climb up to the top of the town, and you emerge into a wooded park with a small ecological museum and access to trails and jeep paths. I kept walking from there, occasionally encountering other hikers or locals, and eventually climbed up the pass toward Jebel EL-Kelaa.

I was following spotty directions, but a goat herder helped set me straight when I missed a turn on the trail. From there, I could follow a solitary hiker with a bright turquoise shirt a half-mile ahead, and he served as the perfect wayfinding beacon to stay on the trail to the peak. Sadly for me, he was fast enough that we crossed paths as he was coming down from the mountain and warned me the trail was a little tricky up ahead. I spent at least 30 minutes scrambling over boulders and trying to gain footing among roots while looking at my surroundings and thinking, “this is definitely not the trail.” I had given up on the peak and decided to make peace with views I already enjoyed when my effort to get back down intersected with the trail I should have been on. Reaching the top of Jebel El-Kelaa was easy from there, and the walk down a bit smoother, too.

In addition to the blueness and the steepness, the cats made me smitten with Chefchaouen. Cats are everywhere in Morocco, living comfortably on the edge of tame and feral, enjoying the privileges of pets by wandering in and out of homes and businesses but without really having a ‘home’ anywhere. Chefchaouen was small enough that in my four days there, I recognized some of the cats — the one with a scar over its eye was sitting on a pile of carpets in a shop one morning, and that afternoon was sleeping on a pile of receipts on the desk of another store down the street. “Is that your cat?” I asked the shopkeeper. He kind of shrugged, yes and no. One shop was crawling with kittens after a momma cat had chosen it as the ideal spot to hunker down and have her litter. They hid and tumbled amidst the lanterns and wood carvings, curled up on the carpets, and probably drummed up business from tourists who wanted to giggle at the kitties and then felt like they ought to buy something while they were there.

[Chefchaouen: March 2018]