Martil

Between the limestone ranges of the Rif and the Mediterranean, only narrow coastal plains open up at the river mouths; one of them is the Martil plain, with small vegetable gardens.¹ The Oued Martil flows past Tetouan and, according to the description in the UNESCO Tentative List, enters the Mediterranean about 10 kilometres east of the city; the old port of Tetouan once lay at its mouth.² Nouzha Boudouhou gives the distance from Tetouan along the river to the sea as about 11 kilometres.³

Martil belongs to the prefecture of M’diq-Fnideq, which the decree of 11 June 2009 lists in the wilaya of Tetouan⁴ and which has been part of the Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima region since 2015.⁵

At the 2024 census Martil had 95,896 inhabitants, compared with 64,355 in 2014; this corresponds to average growth of 4.07 per cent a year. This makes Martil the largest municipality in the prefecture, ahead of Fnideq with 77,250 and M’diq with 67,599 inhabitants; the prefecture as a whole had 254,064 people in 2024.⁶

In 1986 the geographer Jean-François Troin gave Martil’s population as 9,185. He described Martil and M’diq as outer suburbs of Tetouan that supplied the city with fish and vegetables, as seaside resorts for the city and as places of residence for civil servants, into which much money for property flowed from the interior of the country.⁷

The Oued Martil was already a transport route in the early Middle Ages: according to the historian Ahmed Siraj, ships sailed about ten kilometres up it to Tetouan.⁸

The directory of the FAO ArtFiMed project on small-scale fisheries in the Mediterranean lists two landing sites in Martil: Martil Diza with 50 boats and 120 fishers⁹ and Martil Oued El Maleh with 15 boats and 60 fishers; neither had a cold store or a fish market.¹⁰

The Tetouan weather station is 5 metres above sea level. There, mean daily maximum temperatures rise from 17.4 °C in January to 30.3 °C in August; of 654.7 millimetres of annual precipitation, an average of 0.6 millimetres falls in July and 100.4 millimetres in December (WMO climate normals 1991–2020).¹¹