El Jadida

El Jadida lies on the Atlantic coast about 90 kilometres south-west of Casablanca; the Portuguese fortress of Mazagan is now part of the city.¹ El Jadida province belongs to the Casablanca-Settat region.² In the 2024 census the municipality of El Jadida had 237,464 inhabitants, making it the largest municipality in the province, which had 914,367 people in all.³

According to the ICOMOS evaluation, the name Mazagan has appeared in Arabic and European writings since the 11th century; the Portuguese pronounced it Mazagão. When they settled here in 1502, the only building on the site was a tower called el-Brija. After some years in temporary shelters they decided in 1514 to build a citadel, designed by the brothers Francisco and Diogo de Arruda.⁴

In 1541, after the loss of Agadir, the Portuguese enlarged the citadel into a fortress; the plans came from a team made up of the Portuguese João Ribeiro, the Spaniard Juan Castillo and the Italian Benedetto da Ravenna.⁵ By 1548 this had produced a star-shaped stronghold, one of the earliest examples of Portuguese builders adapting Renaissance fortification design to firearms.⁶ The fortress measures about 250 by 300 metres. Its slightly sloping walls average around 8 metres in height and 10 metres in thickness, and a ditch about 20 metres wide, once filled with seawater, surrounded it.⁷

Four bastions survive: the Angel Bastion in the east, St Sebastian in the north, St Anthony in the west and the Holy Ghost Bastion in the south. The fifth, the Governor’s Bastion at the main entrance, has been in ruins since 1769. Of the three gates, the Sea Gate formed a small harbour with the north-east rampart.⁸ The cistern, whose design is attributed to João Castilho, has an almost square plan of 47 by 56 metres; its partly underground central hall, 33 by 34 metres, rests on stone pillars with brick vaults in the Manueline manner.⁹

The 16th-century parish church of Our Lady of the Assumption is 44 metres long and 12 metres wide, with a single nave, a choir, a sacristy and a square bell tower. In front of it stands a 19th-century mosque whose minaret grew out of the cistern’s old Torre de Rebate tower. The church and the cistern lie on the main street, the Rua da Carreira, which leads to the Sea Gate.¹⁰ UNESCO counts the ramparts with their bastions, the cistern and the late-Gothic church in the Manueline style among the surviving buildings of the Portuguese period.¹¹

In 1769 the Portuguese left Mazagan, their last stronghold in Morocco, and the town remained uninhabited for nearly half a century.¹² In the mid-19th century the fortress was restored and given the name El Jadida, “the New”; it became a trading town where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived.¹³ Sultan Moulay Abderrahmane had the destroyed parts of the fortifications rebuilt and a mosque built. Synagogues followed the arrival of Moroccan Jews in the 19th century, and in the second half of the century European merchants, missionaries and envoys arrived.¹⁴

In 2004 UNESCO inscribed the Portuguese City of Mazagan on the World Heritage List under criteria ii and iv; the property covers 7.5 hectares.¹⁵ A 50-metre-wide no-building zone applies around the old ditch, which has been filled in, and in October 2008 work began to clear the eastern side of the walls and uncover the ditches. The site is managed by the Moroccan-Lusitanian Heritage Centre for Study and Research (CERPML).¹⁶ At the time of the nomination, according to ICOMOS, around 3,700 people lived in the Portuguese city.¹⁷

South of the city, on the motorway to Safi, lies the Jorf Lasfar junction.¹⁸ The port of the same name handled around 34 million tonnes in 2022¹⁹ and received 1,269 ship calls. Exports were mainly fertilisers, 8.4 million tonnes, while imports included sulphur, ammonia, coal and 2.5 million tonnes of grain.²⁰

The Salon du Cheval is held at the Parc d’expositions Mohammed VI in El Jadida. The 16th edition, from 30 September to 5 October 2025, drew almost 150,000 visitors, along with around 1,100 horses and more than 700 riders from about 50 countries.²¹

The A1 motorway reaches El Jadida via the 28-kilometre Tnine Chtouka–El Jadida section, opened on 4 November 2006. The 143-kilometre El Jadida–Safi section followed on 1 August 2016; the El Jadida Est and El Jadida Sud junctions serve the city.²²