Safi

Safi belongs to the province of the same name in the Marrakesh-Safi region.¹ In the 2024 census the municipality had 323,888 inhabitants and the province 719,671.² The city's weather station lies 43 metres above sea level; of the roughly 366 millimetres of annual precipitation, almost all falls between October and April.³

As early as the 12th century, under the Almohads, the city was given walls, a kasbah, a mosque and a ribat; the Marinids added a madrasa and a hospital.⁴ The ribat goes back to Abou Mohammed Saleh, the city's patron saint, around whom a brotherhood of pilgrims formed in the 12th and 13th centuries.⁵ In the 14th century the historian Ibn Khaldun called Safi the metropolis of the ocean.⁶

In 1488 the city placed itself under the protection of the Portuguese king John II; from 1508 to 1541 it was Portuguese.⁷ From this period date the sea castle and the city walls, designed by Diogo and Francisco de Arruda in 1512, as well as a rare Gothic cathedral in the Manueline style.⁸

In the 16th century the Saadians set up sugar mills in the Souss, in Haha and near Chichaoua.⁹ The refined sugar was shipped through the port of Safi to Europe, above all to Italy, the Netherlands and England.¹⁰

Finds on the hill of Lalla Hniya Hamriya, discovered in 1994, show that pottery has been made in Safi since at least the Almoravid period in the 11th century.¹¹ During the Portuguese years the craft lay dormant; a document from 1821 attests that the city had been producing ceramics again since the early 18th century.¹²

Boujemâa Lamali, trained at Sèvres, set up a workshop on the Potters' Hill in 1918 and in 1919 founded a ceramics school next to it, the first of its kind in the country¹³; the foundation's museum page gives 1920 as the year of the school.¹⁴ Lamali died in 1971, leaving a repertoire of some 450 shapes and decorations; in 1958 a second ceramics school was added on the Potters' Hill.¹⁵ The hill has been protected as a historic monument since a dahir of 19 November 1920.¹⁶

Today the work is done on the Potters' Hill and in the potters' village, where traditional shaping, glazing and firing live on.¹⁷ The sector has more than 200 workshops and as many sales outlets and employs 1,500 to 2,000 people; blue and white patterns are typical.¹⁸ In 2025 UNESCO admitted Safi to its Creative Cities Network in the field of Crafts and Folk Art.¹⁹

The National Ceramics Museum was founded in 1990 and now belongs to the Fondation nationale des musées.²⁰ Its collection comes largely from the foundation's museums in Tetouan, Tangier, Rabat, Meknes, Marrakesh and Fez, supplemented by donations from master craftsmen of Safi.²¹ After renovation it reopened on 3 March 2018.²²

In the 1950s and 1960s Safi was regarded as the world's largest sardine port by tonnage.²³ On 5 June 1965 the first chemical plant of the phosphate group OCP, Maroc Chimie, was inaugurated in Safi, processing phosphate from the Youssoufia mine; Maroc Phosphore followed in 1976 and Maroc Phosphore II in 1981.²⁴ Since 4 August 2016 the 142-kilometre motorway of Autoroutes du Maroc has linked the city with El Jadida.²⁵