Témara

The municipality of Temara belongs to the prefecture of Skhirate-Temara in the Rabat-Sale-Kenitra region.¹ In the 2024 census it had 297,098 inhabitants; the prefecture's other municipalities include Skhirate with 122,705, Ain El Aouda with 98,502, Ain Attig with 73,985 and Harhoura with 20,950 inhabitants.² Around 38 percent of the prefecture's population lives in the municipality of Temara.³

Between 2014 and 2024 the prefecture grew from 574,543 to 783,475 inhabitants, an average of 3.2 percent a year, against 1.1 percent in the region and 0.9 percent nationally. 93.9 percent of its inhabitants live in towns.⁴ Its urban centres include Tamesna, in the municipality of Sidi Yahya Zaer, which had 86,851 inhabitants in 2024.⁵ Among the literate population of the prefecture, 99.2 percent can read and write Arabic, 69.2 percent French, 31.4 percent English and 1.4 percent Amazigh in Tifinagh script.⁶

Around Temara lie several coastal caves whose layered deposits contain bone tools: the Grotte des Contrebandiers, El Mnasra and Dar es-Soltan I.⁷ The Grotte des Contrebandiers is hollowed into Middle Pleistocene calcareous sandstone and lies on the Atlantic coast within the town limits of Temara.⁸

The Grotte des Contrebandiers yielded a bone tool tradition dated to between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago. The tools served a variety of tasks, probably including the working of leather and fur; the same layers held bones of carnivores that may have been skinned for their fur, and the tip of a whale tooth that appears to have been partly worked by humans.⁹ The finds are kept at the Institut National des Sciences de l'Archéologie et du Patrimoine in Rabat.¹⁰

For the cave of El Mnasra, recent dating shows a human presence between 124,000 and 104,000 years ago; the perforated shells used there by Aterian groups date from roughly 115,000 to 94,000 years ago.¹¹ A single layer of the cave produced 272 shells of the sea snail Tritia cf. gibbosula, six of Tritia corniculum and three of Columbella rustica. The study describes them as the largest collection of ornamental shells from the Middle Stone Age in Africa.¹²

Between Rabat and Casablanca the A1 motorway is 62 kilometres long; in December 2012 it was widened to three lanes in each direction. The Temara junction is at kilometre 3.48, followed further south by Ain Atiq and Skhirat.¹³

On 2 May 2019 the Office National des Chemins de Fer opened the newly built Temara station. It covers 5,900 square metres, 2,160 of them for the station building, has three platforms and an underpass, and cost 36 million dirhams.¹⁴ From then on 44 trains instead of 28 were to stop there, 22 each in the direction of Mohammedia and Casa Port and in the direction of Rabat and Kenitra.¹⁵