Taourirt

Taourirt belongs to the Oriental region and gives its name to one of its provinces.¹ At the 2024 census the town had 100,402 inhabitants in 23,633 households; it accounts for 6.7 per cent of the Oriental’s urban population, and only Oujda and Nador have more people.² Taourirt province had 220,157 inhabitants, 66.1 per cent of whom live in towns. It also includes the towns of El Aïoun Sidi Mellouk, with 40,652 inhabitants, and Debdou, with 4,447.³

At the end of the 13th century Taourirt was a border town between the realm of the Marinids and that of the Abdalwadids of Tlemcen. According to Ibn Khaldun, the town was then shared between an official of the Marinid sultan Abu Yaqub Yusuf and a governor of the Abdalwadid ruler Uthman ibn Yaghmurasan.⁴ When Abu Yaqub arrived with his army, he expelled the Abdalwadid official, took possession of the whole town and laid the foundations of the fortress, supervising the work himself every day from morning to evening; it was finished in the month of Ramadan in 1295.⁵

The chronicle Rawd al-Qirtas also describes the construction: Abu Yaqub had held only half of the border fortress, drove out the Abdalwadid governor and had the walls rebuilt and fitted with iron-clad gates; every morning after prayers he came to the site in person.⁶ Both chronicles relate that he left warriors of the Beni Asker tribe as a garrison under the command of his brother Abu Yahya.⁷ They differ on the year of the Hijra, Ibn Khaldun giving 694 and the Rawd al-Qirtas 695; their translators give 1295 in both cases.⁸

The fortress remained a stronghold on the eastern border of the Marinid realm. According to the Rawd al-Qirtas, Sultan Abu Said spent three months in Taza in 1321, had Taourirt fortified again and stationed horsemen, foot soldiers and archers there.⁹ Ibn Khaldun calls the town Taourirt on the Za and, under Sultan Abu al-Hasan, one of the border posts of the realm, where the sultan left his son Tashfin with a garrison.¹⁰

Taourirt lies on the railway that runs from Oujda via Fez and Meknes to Rabat and Casablanca; here the line to Nador branches off, which opened on 10 July 2009.¹¹ The national portal gave its length as 117 kilometres and its cost as 1,776 million dirhams.¹²

The 320-kilometre motorway from Fez to Oujda has been open since 25 July 2011. Taourirt has two junctions, Taourirt at kilometre 393 and Taourirt-Est at kilometre 401; the next junction towards Fez is Guercif.¹³

Some 55 kilometres north of Taourirt lies the Mohammed V dam, which went into service in 1967 and stands between the provinces of Taourirt and Nador.¹⁴ It serves irrigation on the lower Moulouya, flood protection and power generation. Its wall is being raised by 12 metres so that storage capacity grows from 165 to 981 million cubic metres; according to the Ministry of Equipment and Water, the work was 77 per cent complete in August 2026. The project is meant, among other things, to secure drinking water for Oujda, Berkane, Nador and Taourirt and costs around 1.7 billion dirhams.¹⁵

The nearest station with official climate normals is Oujda, at 465 metres. There, around 271 millimetres of precipitation fall per year on average over 1991 to 2020, only 1.5 millimetres in July; the mean daily maximum ranges from 16.6 °C in January to 34.8 °C in August.¹⁶