Portuguese cities unveiled : interpreting the present medina in the Maghreb

Abstract

While Mazagão represents the long-lasting Portuguese new settlement in Northern Africa (1514-1769), the Portuguese urban experience was mainly made by the occupation of existing Muslim cities. In fact, between 1415 and 1513, six coastal cities were seized from the kingdoms of Fes and Marrakesh (today Morocco). These establishments undertook an occupational praxis over pre-existent Islamic fabrics and implied a re-dimensioning and street layout revision. Case studies present, nevertheless, different perspectives in terms of how the narrow Portuguese stratum marked their urban image at a time when urban concepts and practices were being modernized through the experience with the founding of medieval new towns and the renovating hygienist spirit underlying an emerging modernity in Europe. Levels of adaptation or creation vary and the sources for their identification are scarce. Apart from Spanish Ceuta and Ksar Seghir, the thin Portuguese stratum is encapsulated between long Islamic periods. How is it possible to recover this particular European urban legacy? Ceuta and Tangier, major strongholds in the Strait of Gibraltar, have always gathered considerable cartography. However, in other cities the existence of any kind of historical mapping is almost absent. Through urban fabric analysis and resulting from recent field research, especially in Azemmour, Asilah and Safi, this paper wishes not only to unveil the Portuguese layer but, most significantly, to contribute for the identification of tools for that purpose. Despite centuries of Arab-Islamic re-occupation, urban morphology methodologies allow retrospective keys to the reading of important urban clashes occurred from mid 1400s till the early 1500s that still mark these cities’ present shape and street display. This paper will explore the interpretation of contemporary Islamic tissues in order to identify early-modern Portuguese urban signs in a retrospective approach.