Khouribga

The municipality of Khouribga belongs to the province of the same name in the Beni Mellal-Khenifra region.¹ The province was created on 10 July 1967 by Royal Decree No. 66-701; its creation was linked to one of the largest phosphate mining areas in the country.² The town lies on a barren upland west of the Middle Atlas, informally known as the Plateau des Phosphates³; the Haut-Commissariat au Plan gives its elevation as 800 metres.⁴

Censuses recorded 152,090 inhabitants in the municipality in 1994, 166,397 in 2004 and 196,196 in 2014⁵; in 2024 there were 195,931. Khouribga province reached 525,145 inhabitants in 2024.⁶ Before the 2015 reorganisation it belonged, together with Settat, Berrechid and Benslimane, to the Chaouia-Ouardigha region.⁷

The Office Chérifien des Phosphates was founded in 1920; since 2008 it has been a public limited company under the name OCP S.A.⁸ Near Khouribga, mining began underground in 1921; open-pit extraction has been under way since 1951.⁹ In June 1921 the first train brought phosphate from Boujniba to the port of Casablanca, from where the first shipment was exported in July. To house its workers, the Office put up the first buildings of Khouribga.¹⁰

According to OCP, Khouribga is its most important phosphate mining area. It comprises three mining zones in a sedimentary deposit with estimated reserves of more than 35 billion cubic metres; seven phosphate-bearing layers are worked, and production capacity stands at 19 million tonnes a year.¹¹ In 2013 the Khouribga zone produced just over 17 million tonnes of marketable phosphate, around 66 percent of national output, and 72 percent of exports; the Office had 5,720 permanent employees there.¹²

Since 2014 a pipeline has connected the Khouribga mining area with the Jorf Lasfar industrial platform; it carries the phosphate as a slurry of about 60 percent raw phosphate and 40 percent water.¹³ The main line is 187 kilometres long, with a further 48 kilometres of feeder lines, and it raised transport capacity from 18 to 38 million tonnes a year.¹⁴ In 2020 the Beni Mellal-Khenifra region produced 31.4 million tonnes of phosphate, 77 percent of national output.¹⁵

The Festival du Cinéma Africain de Khouribga is the oldest cultural event in Morocco devoted to film. Its 21st edition, from 15 to 22 December 2018, showed 15 films from 13 African countries in competition for the Ousmane Sembène Grand Prize; the guest of honour was Angola.¹⁶ The province's Faculté polydisciplinaire had a total of 2,387 students in twelve fields of study in 2013/14.¹⁷

The province is connected to the rail network of the Office National des Chemins de Fer over 257 kilometres, 178 of them double-track. In 2013 the railway carried 308,199 passengers and 18.4 million tonnes of freight here, almost exclusively phosphate.¹⁸ The A4 motorway reaches Khouribga via the 40-kilometre section from Ben Ahmed, opened on 1 July 2015; the route onwards via Oued Zem and Kasba Tadla to Beni Mellal had already entered service on 17 May 2014.¹⁹