Tarfaya

Tarfaya lies on the Atlantic coast and is linked by National Road 1 to Agadir in the north and Laayoune in the south.¹ The town belongs to Tarfaya province in the Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra region.² In 2024 the municipality had 11,030 inhabitants, 70 per cent of the province's 16,228; in 2014 it had 8,027, an average growth of 3.2 per cent a year.³

In 1879 the British trader Donald Mackenzie founded the trading post of Port Victoria at Cape Juby. In 1882 stone buildings went up there: a house on land and a solid building on the reef offshore, the Casa del Mar. In 1895 the trading post passed to the Moroccan government.⁴

The Cap Juby airfield was a stopover for the Compagnie Latécoère on the route from Casablanca to Dakar; in 1925 Francisco Cervera built two hangars for the company next to the Spanish fort. From October 1927 to the end of 1928 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ran the airfield, with the task of coming to the aid of pilots lost in the desert. In the fort at Cap Juby he finished his novel “Courrier Sud”.⁵

The Musée de l'Aéropostale, also known as the Musée Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, opened in 2004 and is housed in the Maison de l'Initiative. In front of the museum stands a monument in the form of a Breguet 14. Every year the runway of the old airfield is a stage of the rally from Toulouse to Saint-Louis in Senegal.⁶ In 2024 the Casa del Mar and the Saint-Exupéry airfield were added to the national heritage list (Order No. 1133.24).⁷

In 1958 Tarfaya returned to Morocco.⁸ Construction of the fishing port began in September 1976 and was accepted in June 1979; a second phase followed from 1980 over 16 months, and in 1997 a groyne against silting was added.⁹ The main breakwater is 1,140 metres long. Of the 432 metres of quay, 218 serve fishing and 214 metres, at a depth of 6 metres, serve trade, plus a 16-metre-wide ro-ro ramp; the port area covers 25 hectares of land and 17 hectares of water.¹⁰ The port is used by coastal and small-scale fishing.¹¹

Since 8 December 2014 the Tarfaya wind farm, with 301 megawatts, has been in commercial operation: 131 wind turbines of 2.3 megawatts each over 8,900 hectares. It was built from January 2013 by the Tarfaya Energy Company (TAREC), owned in equal shares by GDF Suez (now Engie) and Nareva; the Office National de l'Électricité et de l'Eau Potable buys the electricity over 20 years.¹²

Some 70 kilometres north of Tarfaya lies the Khnifiss lagoon.¹³ Since 20 June 1980 it has been listed as a wetland of international importance under the name Baie de Khnifiss; the site covers 26,310 hectares of lagoon, salt flats, cliffs and dunes. It is a stopover for migratory birds on the East Atlantic flyway, and the marbled duck is among the species found here.¹⁴

The climate is very dry: the Laayoune station, the nearest with WMO climate normals, records an average of 48 millimetres of precipitation a year. Mean daily maximum temperatures range from 22.7 degrees in January to 31.0 degrees in August.¹⁵