Tangier, Morocco

Tangier's position has decided its history: whoever held the strait held the passage between two seas and two continents, and the city changed hands accordingly — Phoenician, Roman, Muslim from the eighth century, Portuguese, English, and from 1923 to 1956 an international zone administered jointly by several powers, which is the period that gave it its literary reputation. For a traveller following the Andalusian story, Tangier is the crossing point: this is the shore that faced al-Andalus, and the ferries to Tarifa still make the passage in about an hour. The kasbah at the top of the hill holds the former sultan's palace, Dar el Makhzen, and the terrace outside it looks straight across the water. Below, the medina's lanes run down toward the port past the Petit Socco. Café Hafa, on the cliff west of the kasbah, has served mint tea on stepped terraces above the strait since 1921. Further west the headland ends at Cape Spartel, where a nineteenth-century lighthouse marks the meeting of the two seas, and just short of it the Caves of Hercules open through an arch shaped, from inside, roughly like the map of Africa. Tétouan and Chefchaouen, both built by families who left Granada, are within a day's drive to the south.