This tour is aiming at visitors who want to explore the huge artistic and intellectual legacy of Tangier. Once known as an artists’ haven, the city attracted great figures of art and literature among them the celebrated French painter Henri Matisse who called Tangier “The painters’ paradise”.
The streets of Tangier are teeming with artistic and literary memories. In fact, countless painters, novelists, playwrights, poets, photographers, actors, filmmakers from different nations stayed here a while, or made their homes here, inspired by the city’s magic. All of them have left their imprint, and many Tangier’s institutions have entered into legend – the El Minzah Hotel, the Continental Hotel, Café Hafa and Café de Paris, to name but a few!
Henri Matisse, Oscar Wilde, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams still attract and inspire creators from all corners of the world. In speaking of Tangier, we cannot omit to mention another prominent French painter Eugène Delacroix, who exclaimed when he first experienced the city “I’ve just been looking round the town, and at the moment feel like a man caught up in a dream, seeing things he is afraid will finally escape him”. He also said of the city “There is matter for paintings to be found at every street corner”. Today, an art gallery bearing his name, located in Rue de la Liberté, exhibits works by Moroccan and foreign painters. Following Delacroix’s first encounter with Tangier and the works he brought back from his visit, the city’s colours and intense light became something of an obsession among his fellow painters – Matisse, Torres and Mcbey , who could not tear himself away and whose tomb overlooking the Straits bears the Arabic inscription, “He loved Morocco”.
On another level, Tangier is a city that has caused much ink to flow! The American novelist Paul Bowles referred to it as a “Dream city”. The legendary bookstore “Librairie des Colonnes” is a testimony of great literary names as Jean Genet, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams. On our itinerary, as we are passing through, we may take a look inside and browse through the works of some of the writers who fell under the city’s charm!
