For the first half of the twentieth century TANGIER was one of the stylish resorts of the Mediterranean - an international city with its own laws and administration, plus an eclectic community of exiles, expatriates and refugees. It was home, at various times, to Spanish and Central European refugees; to Moroccan nationalists; and - drawn by loose tax laws and free-port status - to over seventy banks and 4000 companies, many of them dealing in currency transactions forbidden in their own countries. Writers were also attracted to the city. Paul Bowles, the American novelist who knew Tangier in the thirties and called it his "dream city", settled here after 1945. William Burroughs spent most of the 1950s here, and most of the Beats - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and the rest - passed through. Tangier was also the world's first and most famous gay resort, a role it maintains to a lesser degree today.

 

At the International Zone 's peak in the early 1950s, Tangier's foreign communities numbered 60,000 - then nearly half the population. When Moroccan independence was gained in 1956, however, Tangier's special status was removed. Almost overnight, the finance and banking businesses shifted their operations to Spain and Switzerland. The expatriate communities dwindled too (today there are under 2000, including 800 Spanish, 600 French, and 150 Britons and Americans, in a city of 425,000), as the new national government imposed bureaucratic controls and instituted a "clean-up" of the city. Brothels - previously numbering almost a hundred - were banned, and in the early 1960s "The Great Scandal" erupted, sparked by a number of paedophile convictions and escalating into a wholesale closure of the once outrageous gay bars.

These ghosts have left a slight air of decay about the city, still tangible in the older hotels and bars, and despite a recent flurry of development and, especially, apartment building, Tangier's future is uncertain. It is never likely to become a mainstream tourist destination - although it is increasingly popular with holidaying Moroccans.

As a port, ranked second only to Casablanca, it still has a future. There are also plans to build another, goods-only port, Tanger Atlantique, on the Atlantic coast financed by the private sector and leaving Tangier a passenger-only port.

Tangier has two other sources of wealth, neither of which appears in official statistics. Cannabis is widely cultivated in the Rif and, until an alternative cash crop is found, will continue to be so; and there is also a lucrative business in ferrying would-be immigrants across the Straits to Spain, with money made in these ways being invested in apartments and other speculative ventures. You will be unlikely to see any cannabis in Tangier, but you will certainly see young men and women from sub-Saharan countries, waiting their opportunity to share in Europe's perceived wealth.

And, as previously noted, Tangier is still a tricky place for first-time arrivals - hustling and mugging stories here should not be discounted and the characters you run into at the port are as objectionable as any you'll find in Morocco - but once you get the hang of it, Tangier is lively and very likeable, highly individual and with an enduring eccentricity