Petit Socco

We are at  the end of Siaghine Street, in the former nerve center of the old neighbourhood commonly known as the Medina.

Here, the colours of the fruits and vegetables, the smell of the spices and the clamour of the merchants will awaken your senses while making you discover a wonderful place teeming with life. In the alleys of Petit Socco – named Souk Dakhel in Arabic – you will find a very lively market where people used to come from the country to sell their products.

Around the end of the XIX century, at the time when the neighbourhood started to be lit up, civilian buildings like the Spanish legislation and the first post office were then built.

At the early XX century, various recreational sites contributed to change the atmosphere of the Petit Socco area, which became a place to meet and to entertain oneself where coffee shops, restaurants and casinos multiplied. Cafe Des Postes, Cafe Fuentes, Cafe de España and the Cafe de la Bourse became meeting points for journalists, writers and artists, sometimes from Tangier, sometimes foreigners.

After dark, the atmosphere of the neighbourhood changes, reminding that the dark and mysterious alleys surrounding the Petit Socco area used to be a place where traffickers and criminals walked around at ease.

Nowadays, the Petit Socco is a tourist destination. You can sit there and daydream trying to imagine all the crazy stories that animated the place in the past. In the coffee shops like the Tingis or the Central, you can savour a Moroccan tea, like celebrities from different generations did, from Tennessee Williams to Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, not forgetting the famous writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.