Youssoufia

Youssoufia belongs to the Marrakesh-Safi region.¹ The province of Youssoufia was created by a decree of 11 June 2009, which at the time assigned it to the Doukkala-Abda wilaya.² At the 2024 census the urban municipality had 65,669 inhabitants in 16,415 households; the province as a whole had 246,148, of whom 100,576 lived in urban and 145,572 in rural areas.³

The town owes its existence to phosphate. The Office chérifien des phosphates (OCP) decided to work a recently discovered deposit around El Gantour, north of Marrakesh; construction of the European quarter began at the end of 1931, and the settlement for the Moroccan workers followed a few years later.⁴ Its first name honoured the French geologist Louis Gentil (1868–1925), who carried out geological exploration in Morocco from 1904.⁵ After the end of the Protectorate, Louis-Gentil was renamed Youssoufia, after Sultan Moulay Youssef.⁶

In the decree of 2 December 1959 that established the municipalities of the Kingdom, Louis-Gentil still appears under that name, as a municipality in the Ahmar district of what was then Marrakesh province, alongside Sidi-Ahmed, Tnine-Jnane-Bouih, Chemaia, Ras-el-Ain, Tleta-Ighoud and Sidi-Chikér.⁷

In 2015 the province comprised eleven municipalities, two urban and nine rural, in two districts.⁸ The second urban municipality is Echemmaia with 26,547 inhabitants (2024); the El Gantour district includes the urban centre of Sidi Ahmed with 6,180, and the Ahmar district includes Ighoud and Jnane Bouih among others.⁹

According to OCP figures from 2002, the Gantour phosphate deposit extends 125 kilometres from east to west and 20 kilometres from north to south. The company estimated its reserves at 31 billion cubic metres, 35 per cent of the country's proven reserves. Mining took place at two centres, Youssoufia since 1931 and Benguerir since 1980, with a production potential of 6.1 million tonnes a year.¹⁰

Youssoufia forms the western part of the deposit and, according to the OCP, lies 60 kilometres from Safi. In 2002 all mining here was underground, with continuous miners for development and longwall equipment for pillar recovery; annual capacity was 2 million tonnes of marketable phosphate, and proven reserves stood at 7.7 billion cubic metres. Processing followed two routes: white phosphate was dried to a moisture content below 2 per cent, while brown phosphate was calcined in fluidised-bed reactors at over 700 °C to remove organic matter.¹¹

Phosphate from Youssoufia travels by rail to Safi, where part of it supplies the phosphoric acid and fertiliser plants and the rest is exported.¹² The first of these plants, “Maroc Chimie”, was inaugurated by King Hassan II (reigned 1961–1999)¹³ on 5 June 1965; it processed phosphate from the Youssoufia mine.¹⁴

The climate figures come from the Safi station on the coast, at 43 metres. Over the years 1991 to 2020 it recorded an average of 366 millimetres of precipitation a year; the mean daily maximum temperature ranged from 18.7 °C in January to 29.3 °C in August.¹⁵