The world’s most enchanting town square

Justin Marozzi on teetering down a path in Morocco, for our series There's a Street In My Neighbourhood

Nowadays, Chefchaouen is known as ‘the Blue Pearl’ of Morocco, known for its traditional houses painted in blue and white

You’d think, after 40 years of trudging, slogging, slipping and sliding up and down it, I would know the name of my favourite street in Chefchaouen. But, hand on heart, and even after eight years of owning a riad townhouse with an old friend in this mountain city in northern Morocco, I haven’t got a clue.

I can tell you where it starts from, where it ends, and why I love it. I can describe the warm smells coming from the nearby bakery at dawn; the call to prayer slicing through the dusk from the minaret of the Rif al Andalus Mosque on its lower reaches; the medley of hole-in-a-wall shops strung along its vertiginous path beneath vine leaves feathering across chinks of sky; the steep flight of 18 steps at its bottom which disgorge you onto the cobbled square around Fontaine Sidi al Mehdi. I can recall the hobbit-hooded silhouettes of young men in jalabas, high on hashish, stumbling home late at night. But the name of this magical little zinqa (alley), which rises sharply up through the labyrinthine medieval medina remains pleasingly elusive.

Chefchaouen — literally ‘look at the horns’ in Arabic — is a preternaturally beautiful town improbably situated at an altitude of 600 metres in the Rif Mountains, 70 miles southeast of Tangier. Founded in 1471 by a distant descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, it tumbles down beneath two spiky fangs of rock, the horns from which it takes its name, in a dazzling landslide of whitewashed roofs and bright blue and white walls.

I wrote my first book here a quarter of a century ago and have been coming back ever since. Mornings I used to turn left out of the house onto Derb Stitou al Hadri and then immediately left again, teetering down the alley – some days you would regret wearing leather-soled babouches slippers on the slippery stone – for a bowl of Mustapha’s steaming bessara – a delicious split fava bean soup made with olive oil, cumin and chilli, served with half a baguette and icy spring water. Breakfast of champions.

Next, after traipsing down past the ceramics sellers on Place Debnat al Makhzen came a café au lait and a freshly squeezed orange juice in the shade of half a dozen mulberry trees on the northern end of Place Outa al Hammam. This is a strong contender for the world’s most enchanting town square, with its Grand Mosque, the ochre, high-walled kasbah (fortress), a solitary fir tree needling towards the heavens and a garland of alfresco cafés and restaurants set against a vista of blue-and-white houses climbing up the mountains.