LARACHE is a relaxed, easy-going town, its summer visitors primarily Moroccan tourists, who come to enjoy the beaches to the north of the estuary of the River Loukos. You'll see as many women around as men - a reassuring feeling for women travellers looking for a low-key spot to bathe. Nearby, and accessible, are the ruins of ancient Lixus , legendary site of the Gardens of the Hesperides.

 

Physically, the town looks like an amalgam of Tangier and Tetouan: an attractive place, if not spectacularly so. It was the main port of the northern Spanish zone and, though the central Plaza de España has since become Place de la Libération, it still bears much of its former stamp. There are faded old Spanish hotels, Spanish-run restaurants and Spanish bars, even an active Spanish cathedral (Mass Sat 7pm, Sun 11am) for the small colony who still work at the docks. In its heyday it was quite a metropolis, publishing its own Spanish newspaper and journal, and drawing a cosmopolitan population that included the French writer Jean Genet, who spent the last decade of his life here and is buried in the old Spanish cemetery.

Before its colonization in 1911, Larache was a small trading port, its activities limited by dangerous offshore sand bars. Without these, it might have rivalled Tangier, for it is better positioned as a trade route to Fes. Instead, it eked out a living by building pirate ships made of wood from the nearby Forest of Mamora for the "Barbary Corsairs" of Salé and Rabat