Morocco

Today

Jim Lawley

Even playgrounds are no longer safe in Ceuta after the migrant invasion

Ceuta, population 83,000, suffered what is being described as its worst night of vandalism last night since some 70,000 migrants poured across the Moroccan border at the end of July. Vehicles and rubbish containers were set alight in several districts, fires were started among belongings in migrant encampments and police intervened in several fights between migrants. Madrid puts the number remaining in its North African exclave at around 5,000. But current estimates in Ceuta suggest it is almost double. Night after night, Spanish television shows disturbing scenes from Ceuta Nearly 13,000 pupils are due to return to school today under an extraordinary security operation.

Wednesday

Jonathan Meades

The man who – inadvertently – invented the 1970s

Style, self-evidently among those who pursue an interest in such affairs, is, according to the Comte de Buffon, the man himself – the essence, the heart, the bowel, the bovril. While, among the much greater majority who pursue an ignorance in such affairs, it is an assumed gamut of off-the-peg tics, props, accent – style is something bolted on to a being’s chassis and core in the hope that it will hold. We can be certain which of these two nugatory classifications better suits the late Christopher Gibbs who in the course of his long, more or less antiquarian life encountered Everyone, absolutely Everyone. ‘Everyone’ in this instance unhelpfully signifies little beside the people, per se, whom Gibbs met, smiled at, sold to, bought from, bought for, advised and charmed.

Monday

Jim Lawley

The Ceuta crisis isn’t over

On July 30 and 31 around 80,000 migrants entered Ceuta from Morocco, according to the Spanish government’s latest estimate. Roughly 90 percent have since gone back. But, according to the government’s estimate, somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 remain in the Spanish city whose normal population is 83,000. Ceuta’s authorities believe the figure may be as high as 11,000. At least 83 bodies connected with the crossing have been recovered on the Spanish side of the border. Morocco officially acknowledges another 14 deaths but humanitarian organizations have estimated that in total more than 140 people have died since the border was breached.

ceuta

Tuesday

Sarah Moorhouse

Were the French structuralists of the 1960s really as cool as they seemed?

From our UK edition

‘Theory was cool. Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.’ When Emily Eakin first encountered ‘theory’ as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1980s, it marked the start of an obsession, intense as a love affair. She wasn’t the only one. For the Anglophone world, France has long represented a style of thinking that is just that: stylish. It’s not for nothing that an estimated three million American tourists flock to the boulevards of Paris each year. The place is synonymous with glamour in its most alluringly intelligent form.

Friday

Brendan O’Neill

We should call the Ceuta border breach an invasion

Spain was invaded yesterday. There is no other way to put it. Close to 50,000 foreigners, mostly men, swarmed into Spanish territory and laughed and jeered as they went. Every generation before ours would have called that an invasion, and we should too. The era of euphemism is over. The left’s house of lies has fallen. We can all now see with our own eyes that our nations are being overwhelmed by cocky, often hostile men from afar. It isn’t only Spain’s sovereign integrity that lies in tatters following the storming of Ceuta – so does the tyranny of euphemism we’ve all been forced to labor under these past few years The footage from Ceuta is extraordinary – throngs of foreigners, mostly men from Morocco, gatecrashed an enclave of the Spanish kingdom.

ceuta

Tuesday

Mark Piesing

The West has become its own worst enemy

From our UK edition

On 27 January 2024, Iranian-backed militants launched a one-way attack drone at the US base known as Tower 22 in the Syria-Iraq borderlands. It hit and killed three American soldiers and injured many other members of the 350-strong garrison. The attack was a pivotal moment. Before it, no US ground troops had been killed by an enemy aircraft since the Korean War. But they had been now, and would be again. Two years later, a similar attack, this time by Iran itself, evaded US air defences, hit a US command centre in Kuwait and killed six personnel. It was the deadliest Iranian strike of the recent conflict. Steve Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an expert on technology, democracy and national security and an award-winning author.

Tuesday

Adrian Brune

The vagabond spirit of Mirleft, Morocco’s surf nook

At first, the sleepy little town of Mirleft looks like all the others on the 600-mile trek through the sands of the Sahara: half-gravel, half-concrete sidewalks, faded paint, brightly painted schools and the minaret of a new mosque jutting up toward the sky. But a mile past Mirleft’s dusty high street lie cliffs of California proportions — with swells to match. The cliffs arch down at a near forty-five-degree angle and into meaty waves rolling toward a point break. It’s here that a group of ten French and German surfers have joined up with Issam Surf School, heading down to Plage Sauvage, the beach below, in a 4x4.

mirleft

Wednesday

Amber Duke

What’s missing in America

I’m back! As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my husband and I recently set off on our ten-day honeymoon to Morocco. We went to Casablanca, Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh, the Agafay Desert and Essaouira. I didn’t travel much growing up and so this trip was really special for me. We toured one of the largest mosques in the world and a fifteenth-century synagogue that is still active today, visited the Roman ruins of Volubilis, trekked through the Medinas, haggled in the souk, watched artisans create their handmade crafts with techniques handed down for centuries, rode camels and enjoyed traditional Berber food and music. Before we left for our trip, we fielded a lot of safety concerns.

Sunday

Adrian Brune

Welcome to Ouarzawood, Moroccan desert outpost and set of many major movies

It’s been a nearly seven-hour drive up and down the Atlas Mountains from Marrakech before a roundabout appears at the entrance to Ouarzazate, the Amazigh (Berber) outpost where we might be able to stave off hunger, thirst and fatigue. But first, follow that roundabout — the one featuring a gigantic director’s clipboard. Then turn left and enter the parking lot of the Atlas Studios, known to the outside world as Ouarzawood, the must-see largest studio in the Sahel, just 230 miles from Merzouga: the gateway to the Sahara. Park before a half-dozen faux Egyptian Ka statues — think gigantic copies of King Tut’s tomb — then a gate opens and just beyond lie the sets to a dozen or more popular movies.

atlas

Wednesday

Lara Prendergast

The finest hotels in Marrakesh

From our UK edition

British travellers have found solace in Marrakesh for many years. In early February, I visited the city and happened to be on the first flight out of the UK to Morocco after travel restrictions were lifted. The plane was full of all sorts of characters – old hippy types desperate to feel the thrill of the city once more, stylish couples dressed in matching head-to-toe black, younger families keen for some not-too-faraway winter sun. The city has many hotels and riads tucked away within its walls. Here are a few of my favourites. The Royal Mansour The Royal Mansour is the jewel in the crown of Marrakesh’s hotel scene, in large part because the King of Morocco is the man behind its creation.

Monday

Gus Carter

Are the Abraham Accords working?

From our UK edition

Two years ago, UAE citizens were barred from entering Israel. No longer. The inaugural Emirates flight touched down in Tel Aviv last week, a Boeing 777 carrying 335 passengers. For much of the 20th century, the only thing that the Middle East could agree on was the destruction of the Jewish state. But attitudes are changing. The purported reason is the so-called Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 after Donald Trump decided to solve the seemingly intractable problem of the Middle East. If Don the Dealmaker couldn’t do it, who could? Seven decades of antagonism had failed, the White House argued, and the Palestinian cause seemed as troubled as ever, so why not try a different approach?

Thursday

Jason Goodwin

Consigned to a living tomb: Aziz BineBine endures 18 years in a subterranean prison

From our UK edition

Imagine being on indefinite lockdown, imprisoned in a dark, underground, 6’ x 12’ cell, freezing in winter, boiling in summer and infested with cockroaches and scorpions. The bed is a narrow concrete ledge, where you can only sleep on your side. The toilet has no U-bend, and your cell, No. 13, at the end of a run of cells, receives all the waste and floodwater from the others. There are no windows. Aziz BineBine spent his young adult life there, 18 years from 1973 to 1991. His crime was to have participated unwittingly as a young cadet officer in an abortive 1971 coup against Hassan II of Morocco. He escaped, bewildered, from a bloodbath at the palace without having fired a shot. He turned himself in, was tried and imprisoned.

Saturday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Tales from behind the veil: Moroccan women talk about lies and sex

From our UK edition

The Moroccan-born Leïla Slimani has made her name writing novels of propulsive intensity. Lullaby, the story of a nanny who kills the two children in her care, was the first to be published in English (it was also the most read book in France in 2016). Adèle, about a sex addict who takes little pleasure from increasingly violent and self-destructive sexual encounters, came next. It was while on a book tour of Morocco discussing Adèle that Slimani hit on the idea for Sex and Lies. Many young women approached her at readings, wanting to tell her about their own sexual experiences, and it is these stories — that ‘shook me, upset me, that angered and sometimes disgusted me’ — that she has collected in this slim volume.