The Medina of Tétouan stands on the slopes below the Rif Mountains, close to the Mediterranean and the Strait of Gibraltar. A fortified settlement was established here under the Marinids in the early fourteenth century, traditionally around 1307–1308, as a base in regional struggles that included pressure on Portuguese-held Ceuta. Castilian forces destroyed that town in 1399 because of its association with raiding. The medina visible today therefore grew largely from a later refoundation rather than surviving intact from the first medieval settlement.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Sidi Ali al-Mandri and refugees from Granada rebuilt Tétouan. Muslims and Jews expelled or displaced as Iberian Christian kingdoms completed the conquest of al-Andalus brought architectural knowledge, crafts, language, music, foodways, commercial relationships, and urban customs. Further arrivals followed later expulsions, including Moriscos in the early seventeenth century. Tétouan consequently became one of Morocco’s clearest expressions of Andalusian urban culture, adapted to a North African political, religious, and environmental setting.

Walls and gates enclose a dense pattern of neighborhoods, markets, workshops, mosques, houses, fountains, ovens, schools, and religious complexes. Narrow streets respond to slope, climate, privacy, and incremental growth rather than a rigid geometric plan. Courtyard houses often conceal refined plaster, tile, painted wood, and carved decoration behind plain exterior walls. Specialized craft and market areas supported leatherwork, weaving, embroidery, metalwork, woodwork, food production, and regional trade. The medina’s form depended on shared facilities and close relations among residence, worship, manufacture, and exchange.

Tétouan’s history included periods of maritime trade, privateering, diplomatic exchange, epidemic, conflict, and changing rule. A Jewish community played a major role in commerce and crafts; after destruction of the older Jewish quarter in the early nineteenth century, a new mellah developed within the city. Spain occupied Tétouan from 1860 to 1862, and the city later served as capital of the Spanish protectorate in northern Morocco from 1913 until Moroccan independence in 1956. A planned modern expansion grew outside the walls while the medina remained the historic center.

The colonial division between an old medina and European-style Ensanche altered administration, infrastructure, movement, and social geography. Independence brought new migration and economic change, including the departure of much of the Jewish population. Yet workshops, markets, mosques, homes, and neighborhood traditions continued to make the medina a lived environment. UNESCO placed it on the World Heritage List in 1997, recognizing its unusually complete Andalusian character and its historical role as a point of contact between Morocco and Iberia.

Preservation must go beyond restoring picturesque façades. Traditional houses face subdivision, abandonment, inappropriate materials, moisture, crowding, and changing patterns of work, while tourism can displace residents or simplify the city’s multicultural past. Conservation programs increasingly combine infrastructure, craft knowledge, documentation, and adaptive reuse, although results remain uneven. The medina’s meaning lies in both architecture and the communities that produced it: Andalusian refugees, local Muslim residents, Jewish families, artisans, merchants, scholars, women managing courtyard households, and laborers maintaining shared systems. Its streets show how forced migration generated cultural renewal without erasing memories of loss. Tétouan remains a Moroccan city shaped by centuries of movement across the strait, not a sealed remnant of Spain transplanted to Africa.