Tangier
The oral legend says that after the flood, Noah’s ark lost the way out to the land, suddenly a pigeon stood upon the ark with some mud sticked on its feet and the survivors yelled “Tan .. Ja, Tan .. Ja” in Arabic which refers to “mud comes … mud comes” which refers to that the land is nearby. From then onwards the Arabs and Berbers call it TANJA or Tangier.
Tangier’s history has been shaped by its strategic location as a meeting point of two seas as well as two continents. The Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, and the Romans were all settled here in the 8th century. In 711, Arabs and Berbers gathered here to conquer Spain, which later in 1912 colonized and took control of the northern part of Morocco. Tangier however remained under international administration. This was the city’s heyday; its image as a romantic and sensuously exotic place was made in literature and on the big screen, from Henri Matisse to Paul Bowles and writers of the Beatles generation.
