Chefchaouen is a blue city in the Rif Mountains. The walls are painted in shades from light to nearly black indigo.
They say blue repels mosquitoes. In reality, the tradition came from Jewish refugees from Spain in the sixteenth century — they settled here and painted their houses the color of the sky as a reminder of God, who suddenly felt too distant.
My mom touches the walls and asks why there is still so much blue. I say: because it works — people come here to take photos.
Here, unlike in French-speaking Tangier, many people speak Spanish — the trace of those refugees remains not only on the walls.
On our first day, after getting off the bus, we headed up the road into the hills because Google had placed our riad not in the medina but somewhere in the slums among the clouds. We realized this too late — it turned into quite the quest.
That was my first impression — dragging my own bag and my mom’s suitcase up a forty-five-degree slope while the city lay below us, white and blue, compact. The air turned cold and damp. Then we literally walked into a cloud — it was hanging right over the slope. The houses dissolved into haze, the sounds became muffled. You walk, and around you is gray emptiness — only walls appearing out of the fog.
But soon we switched on critical thinking, turned around, and went back down into the medina. There we asked every shopkeeper, showing the photo on our phone. Eventually we found it and checked into a very traditional riad, under whose windows loud Arabic conversation doesn’t stop until late at night.
We’ll drink mint tea here for a couple of days and then move on — to Rabat.
