Chichaoua

Chichaoua belongs to the province of the same name in the Marrakesh-Safi region.¹ At the 2024 census the urban municipality had 38,452 inhabitants in 9,127 households. The province had 379,079 inhabitants, of whom 294,718 lived in rural areas; the province's other urban municipality, Imintanoute, had 25,049.²

In the decree of 2 December 1959 that established the municipalities of the Kingdom, Chichaoua belongs to the Imi-n-Tanoute district of what was then Marrakesh province, together with Sidi-Mokhtar, Imi-n-Tanoute and Sebt-des-Mzouda.³ Chichaoua became a province in its own right in 1991.⁴ In 2015 it comprised 35 municipalities, 33 of them rural, in four districts.⁵

Sugar production in Morocco flourished under the Saadians, above all in the second half of the 16th century. Sugar mills were built in the Souss, in Haha and around Chichaoua, with a particularly large number here because the area lay between the capital, Marrakesh, and the port of Safi. Refined sugar was shipped from Safi to Italy, the Netherlands and England; with Italy, Sultan Ahmed al-Mansour agreed to exchange sugar for marble weight for weight, and that marble was used to build the al-Badi palace in Marrakesh.⁶

The “Sour Laâbid” mill near Chichaoua was investigated by the archaeologist Paul Berthier in the 1960s; he published his findings in a work on Morocco's old sugar mills and their water systems. Ceramics from this excavation, vessels used in 16th-century sugar production, are on display in the Musée national de la céramique in Safi, which opened in 2018.⁷

By an order of 18 March 2022, the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication added the southern sugar mill of Chichaoua to the list of protected monuments; the application had come from the association of graduates of the Institut national des sciences de l'archéologie et du patrimoine. The site lies in the municipalities of Lamzoudia, Ahdil and Sidi Bouzid Arragragui; any alteration now requires the approval of the cultural authorities.⁸

Carpets from Chichaoua traditionally have a red ground and a black, serrated border. Their hallmark is a free layout: the weavers place their motifs without symmetry, without a frame and without a preliminary drawing.⁹ In Sidi El Mokhtar the historian Fatema Zahra Tamouh founded a carpet cooperative with a shared workshop and raw materials, supported by the United Nations Development Programme; according to a 2006 report, carpets there fetched 10,000 to 15,000 dirhams instead of the 500 to 1,000 dirhams previously paid by middlemen.¹⁰

The regional tourism council counts 98 craft cooperatives in the province, covering weaving, carpets, jewellery, zellige and basketry.¹¹ One of them is the women's cooperative “Nissae Al Khayr” in the municipality of Mzouda, with about ten members, which sews and weaves carpets; of its funding of 285,200 dirhams, the Initiative nationale pour le développement humain (INDH) contributed 171,120 dirhams.¹²

Chichaoua lies on the motorway from Marrakesh to Agadir, which measures about 234 kilometres from its junction with the Settat–Marrakesh motorway. The route bypasses the town to the east; the sections from the RN8 to Chichaoua and from Chichaoua to Imintanoute are each 33 kilometres long and were budgeted at 1,060 and 975 million dirhams.¹³

The climate figures come from the Marrakesh station at 464 metres. Over the years 1991 to 2020 it recorded an average of 221 millimetres of precipitation a year; the mean daily maximum temperature ranged from 19.1 °C in January to 37.7 °C in July.¹⁴