Known as the City of Dreams, Tangier was at the crossroads of cultures for much of its history. From 1923 to 1956, the city was called the International Zone and was jointly administered by Spain, France and the United Kingdom. It had a low cost of living and no visa requirement. If you had a valid ID you could become a citizen of Tangier.

The city attracted writers, misfits and criminals who moved there for its temperate climate and libertine atmosphere. Days were spent smoking kif (cannabis mixed with tobacco) at local cafes. Evenings were spent drinking at cabarets, being entertained by belly dancers and drag queens. Tangier was an enclave for rootless exiles whose backstories changed with each telling. No one was who they appeared to be. This suited writers like Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams who found a place of belonging in the foreign colony.     

Tangier was a sanctuary for gay Westerners. They lived here in exile from the repressive societies back home where homosexuality was criminalized. The International Zone was a place where everything was permitted as long as you were discreet. You could smoke cannabis at outdoor cafes. You could buy morphine over the counter in drug stores. The city was an enclave for experimental writers. William Burroughs moved here in 1954. The beat writer found Tangier to be a place of tolerance where he wouldn’t get harrassed for being a homosexual and a drug addict. 

The city was a haven for London gangsters like Billy Hill and Ronnie Kray. Billy Hill had been a leader of ‘the heavy mob’ in London and from Tangier he kept tabs on his gambling operation in Mayfair. His wife Gypsy operated one of the biggest nightclubs in Tangier. Paul Lund, another British criminal, drifted to Tangier and began smuggling whisky and hashish into Spain.

‘When I first came here,’ he said, ‘this was a smugglers’ port. There were as many as seventy, eighty fast launches working out of Tangier to Italy, France and Spain.’   

While smuggling cigarettes from the Canary Islands, he got into a shootout with the Italian coast guard. He was arrested and sent to prison in Livorno. He was called ‘the Buccaneer’ because of his daring exploits in running contraband, smuggling in guns and smuggling out drugs. In Tangier, he ran the Novara Bar, a small dive with only six bar stools.  

Errol Flynn was among the regulars, drinking bourbon at the bar, regaling patrons with stories of his years in New Guinea, working as a patrol officer and a gold prospector in Wau and as a boat captain on the Sepik river. Lund’s close friend George Greaves hung around the Novara Bar. He was a stringer for the Daily Mail and an informant for the Moroccan police. He invited Lund to breakfast one day and said, ‘Listen, Paul, if you can get me a little information on arms shipments, I think a lot could be forgotten.’ 

A notorious denizen in town was the American pirate ‘Nylon Sid’ Paley. He was a trafficker in nylon stockings and drove around in a cream-colored Cadillac. He was charged with piracy on the high seas when his privateer vessel rammed a Dutch ship off the Barbary Coast and masked men with machine guns boarded the ship, looting thousands of cases of American cigarettes. 

The author Paul Bowles was a pivotal figure in Tangier. He moved here with his wife Jane who was also a writer. He wanted to live anywhere outside the United States. After spending time in Paris, he made a permanent move to Morocco. Bowles was a bisexual who enjoyed the company of young Arab men. He wrote much of his work on majoun, a confection made from cannabis.

Bowles is best known for his novel The Sheltering Sky, a story about two American travellers, Port and Kit, a young married couple estranged from each other who travel into the desert hoping to resolve their marital problems. Port is rootless and adrift, ‘belonging no more to one place than to the next.’ Cut off from the past, he is searching for a primal place in the desert of North Africa.  

Jane Bowles was in love with Cherifa, a peasant girl who sold grains at the market. Cherifa was illiterate and spoke only the Maghrebi dialect. She kept Jane under her control through black magic. She made frequent requests for money and told Jane to buy her a Mercedes. Jane gifted her with scarves and watches, and eventually gave the women her house.      

Jane was an impulsive alcoholic. She spent afternoons on the beach with Tennessee Williams and drank heavily at the Parade Bar on rue de Fes. The bar was decorated in red velvet and the walls were hung with Orientalist art. A black slipper studded with rhinestones was displayed on a shelf behind the bar. A pet owl on a chain flew around the room. Jay Hazelwood, the owner from Georgia, stood behind the bar, chewing tobacco and spitting into a brass spittoon. 

At the Parade, you could drink a gin fizz and talk to a drag queen in a kaftan. There you’d find Leslie the English mooch, cadging drinks at the bar from a Spanish marquesa. Bowles used the regulars at the Parade as models for his characters in the novel Let it Come Down. Only the main character, Nelson Dyar, is fictional. Dyar is a New York banker who moves to Tangier to take a job at a friend’s travel agency. He describes the city as ‘a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another.’ Dyar gets involved in the political intrigue of the place, smuggling money into Europe and getting recruited as an informant by a blue-haired woman at the Parade Bar.             

At the bar you could drink martinis with flamboyant gay aristocrats. The youthful Truman Capote was a regular. He had just published his first novel, and after traveling around Europe, decided to spend the summer in Tangier. One evening at the Parade, a good-looking blonde man bought him some drinks. Capote described him in the novel Answered Prayers.    

‘He was an American, about forty, but with one of those off-centred accents that happen to people who are used to speaking a number of languages.’   

They had some drinks and talked for a while. When the blond man left, Capote asked the bartender what the man did.

‘He’s a friend of the rich,’ Hazelwood said. ‘He hits Tangier two, three times a year, always on someone’s yacht; he spends all summer moving from one yacht to another.’  

The port city attracted outcasts and smugglers, spies and outlaws. It was a refuge for Burroughs after the horrific night in Mexico City. That night at a party, his wife put a highball glass on her head, and he fatally shot her in a drunken game of William Tell. He fled Mexico for the Amazon rainforest where he experimented with ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic vine, and then took a ship to Tangier.

Burroughs settled into the city and meandered the narrow streets, losing himself in the medina with its dark cafes and dilapidated buildings, a spectral figure haunted by the killing of his wife. He smoked kif with shoeshine boys in the local cafes. He merged into the shadows and pursued oblivion through drugs. Within a month, he was addicted to the opioid Eukodol.  

Burroughs spent a lot of time sitting around in cafes. He’d sit at a table in the Petit Socco, a square in the medina, and watch the crowd going by—dwarves selling lottery tickets, Berber women carrying loads of charcoal, street boys lingering around the square.   

The Café Centrale was a place to while away the time with some of the drifters who came by for a glass of tea or water. Sitting at the cafe was Sam, a British expat who was always broke. People avoided him like a contagion. Tainted with bad luck, he’d ‘lost all his money in a bee-raising venture in the West Indies.’ There was Antonio the Portuguese mooch. He’d shuffle in, sit down with Burroughs and lament about ‘the tragedies of his life, filled with sickness and hunger.’  

Estelle stopped by for a coffee. She was an Afro-Chinese girl who worked at a whorehouse called the Black Cat. A former model in Paris, she arrived in Tangier on a yacht and planned to return to Europe, but was stranded when the captain sailed off without her. 

Burroughs talked to the regulars, many of them claiming they couldn’t be repatriated and ‘hinting at dark crimes committed’ in their country of origin. Tangier was a place of make-believe, a strange Neverland where a tribe of exiles had been cast adrift. Burroughs described some of the local expats hanging out at the Socco   

“Sitting at a cafe table,” he said, “listening to some ‘proposition,’ I would suddenly realize that the other was telling a fairy story to a child, the child inside himself: pathetic fantasies of smuggling, of trafficking in diamonds, drugs, guns, of starting nightclubs, bowling alleys, travel agencies.”

The Socco was a good people-watching spot. Here you could see Maumi the flamenco dancer, sipping a mint tea and cooling himself with a lacy fan. You could see Truman Capote sitting at a table, drinking wine and eating tapas. The Socco, he said, was ‘a display ground for prostitutes, a depot for drug-peddlers, a spy center and the place where some simpler folk drink their evening aperitif.’

Another Tangier resident was the Canadian artist Brion Gysin. He was a painter, sound poet and performance artist. He made calligraphic art influenced by Arabic and Japanese script. Gysin came from the Canadian prairie and attended boarding school in Edmonton, Alberta. His father was killed in the Battle of the Somme during World War I. The horror and futility of that war made Gysin distrustful of having a national identity and for most of his life he referred to himself as ‘the man from nowhere.’    

In Morocco, he took on a different identity. He shaved his head and wore a djellaba. He made a trip into the Sahara and was awed by the stark beauty of the desert as he travelled the ancient caravan route from Timbuktu. In the desert he encountered the Blue People of the Sahara, Taureg nomads whose indigo dyed clothes tinted their skin blue. He explored the old fortress city of Fez and viewed the adobe forts with slit windows in the Atlas mountains. He wandered the medina of Marrakech and took in the strangeness of the place with its ancient doorways and keyhole arches, its acrobats and snake-charmers. 

He meandered along the market streets, past rug merchants and astrologers, vendors selling camel saddles and Berber jewellery. Anatomical charts were spread on the pavement. Old women sold the ingredients of Moroccan magic, the lion claws and chameleon legs brewed into potions. Gysin browsed the colorful souks that sold Berber tapestries, curved daggers and tajine pots.         

Hotel Rembrandt is within walking distance of the medina in Tangier. The baroque hotel has a vintage lobby with a spiral staircase and a classic elevator. During the 1950s the hotel was an institution in the city. Jane Bowles stayed here in 1951. In the hotel gallery, Gysin exhibited his sketches of the Sahara desert, ink paintings shadowed with smudges. He remembered William Burroughs coming to the gallery one afternoon. Burroughs described the paintings as ‘vistas of the Sahara, the best of them recalling the bare, haunted rock and desert of Dali’s dream landscapes.’ Gysin was put off by the pale appearance of Burroughs and snubbed him because of his reputation with narcotics.   

Over time, they become close friends and collaborators. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up technique, a method that took sampled text and recombined it to make something new. Gysin spliced together words from a stack of newspapers he had cut through with a box-cutter. Burroughs and Gysin started cutting and splicing the clippings with passages from Rimbaud and Shakespeare, creating a collage of words. They tape-recorded the cut-up prose and then recut the magnetic tape to create even more cut-ups. They overdubbed the taped cut-ups with snippets of conversation and sampled music. The method was a prelude to the cut-and-paste, sample-and-remix technique used in creating digital media.     

One day Gysin went to a music festival in Sidi Kacem. At the tomb of a local saint, he listened to Sufi trance musicians play flutes, tambourines and reed instruments called raitas. He was enchanted. They came from the ancient village of Joujouka in the Rif mountains. The Master Musicians of Joujouka were descendants of a Sufi saint and played mesmerizing music. They played for hours without stopping and people with disturbed spirits were healed by trance dancing to the hypnotic music.

Gysin watched a boy in goatskins dance as Boujeloud, the goat-god, the protector of shepherd boys. He danced wildly to the hypnotic drumming, the dancing and drumming driving Boujeloud back to his cave. Gysin was enthralled by the music and told the Masters that he wanted to hear them play every day. They told him if he opened a cafe in Tangier, they would come and make music there. 

So Gysin opened a restaurant in the Marshan called 1001 Nights. Located in a wing of the Menebhi Palace, the restaurant served Moroccon cuisine and was decorated with low wooden tables and brass lanterns with colored glass panels. Gysin took out ads in the Tangier Gazette that read:

‘In the harem quarters of an ancient palace, to the music of a Riffian orchestra and dancing, enjoy a memorable dinner at the 1001 nights.’     

The restaurant was authentic enough to be popular with Moroccans. Many expats went there for drinks and dinner, including Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and the photographer Cecil Beaton. Dancing boys swayed between the tables with brass trays filled with tea glasses balanced on their heads. Christopher Isherwood described them in his diary.

‘The boys were very interesting to watch—their negligent grace, their delicately mocking salutes when you gave them money. Their hip movements and flirtatious play with the scarves was exquisitely campy and yet essentially masculine.’

Patrons drank North African wines and ate couscous and pigeon pie. The entertainment included a performance by Jaujouka musicians. It was a spectacle, like something out of Arabian Nights, with fire-eaters and sword-swallowers, acrobats and dancing boys. After dinner an American mystic did a whirling dervish dance on the marble floor.  

After midnight Burroughs went to La Mar Chica, a flamenco bar near the port. The narrow bar, with green walls and sawdust on the floor, was patronised by gypsies, bullfighters and sailors. The owner Adolfo looked like a prizefighter from the 1890s and his bar was popular with British sailors and Spanish dockworkers. 

Burroughs had come here often with his boyfriend Kiki. He was nostalgic for the time they had spent together. Kiki had left him for a Cuban bandleader he met at the bar who offered him work as the band’s drummer. They toured Spain together, but the relationship was short-lived. One night the jealous bandleader found Kiki in bed with a female band member and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. 

Burroughs now went to the flamenco bar with an Irish friend. The bar was a hangout for veterans of the Spanish Civil War. A man wearing a Cordoban hat drank from a wineskin. On a small stage a gypsy band played Andulucian music. A flamenco guitarist sat on a chair at the back of the stage, his fingers flickering over the strings. There was staccato clapping, shouting and foot stomping. The flamenco singer, a Spanish gypsy, sang poorly. On many nights, she was too drunk on brandy to get on stage to perform. 

Burroughs talked with an American bullfighter who’d been badly gored in Spain. Sidney Franklin was a closeted bullfighter who had a flair for style and wore a pink costume with gold brocade. He was a flamboyant matador known for his theatrical cape work. Hemingway was a good friend and described his ‘graceful cape fighting’ in Death in the Afternoon, his book on bullfighting.      

The bar was a night haunt for gun-runners and opium smugglers. Drinking at a table was a lesbian couple who worked on a smuggling ship. Burroughs stood against the bar, drinking a beer. He looked around the room. A compatriot came over to him and said, ‘It’s the end of the world, Tangier. Don’t you feel it, Bill?’  

Tangier had a hypnotic effect on many of the expats living there. The gateway to Africa, it transcended cultures and borders and was a portal into other dimensions. People gave themselves over to the mystical undercurrents of the city. Burroughs said Tangier was ‘the prognostic pulse of the world, like a dream extending from past into future, a frontier between dream and reality.’

The Cafe de Paris was another hang-out for Tangier-based expats. Founded in 1920, it was a meeting place for British spies during the Second World War. Overlooking the Place de France, the cafe has beige walls and tables and leather chairs you can sit in while sipping a cafe au lait. Inside there are mostly older Moroccan men playing dominoes and talking about politics, but there is plenty of outside seating where you can watch the crowd go by.

The clock on the wall stopped working years ago and the furniture looks like it hasn’t been changed since the days when Mohamed Choukri sat here with Genet, discussing the Theatre of the Absurd. The two writers had a lot in common. When he was eleven, Choukri ran away from home and joined other homeless children on the streets of Tangier, mingling with drunks and pimps. He got into petty theft, prostitution and smuggling. Genet had also been a vagabond and a thief in Paris before becoming a writer.

Tennesse Williams spent time at the cafe, drinking a Fernet and Coke and reading the Herald Tribune. Allen Ginsberg enjoyed sitting here with Ahmed Yacoubi, the painter and storyteller, drinking tea and eating eclairs. You could find Paul Bowles at the cafe, smoking a kif cigarette from a black holder, listening to the cicadas in the eucalyptus trees.     

Located in the medina, Hotel Continental is one of the oldest hotels in Tangier. Scenes from Bertolucci’s film version of The Sheltering Sky were shot here. On the wall hang photos of Bowles sitting at his typewriter, photos of him recording Moroccan music and posters of The Sheltering Sky. The hotel has a good view of the harbor framed by palm trees.

Also located in the medina is the old American Legation which is now a museum and cultural center. The Moorish-style building contains a wing dedicated to Paul Bowles where his memorabilia, letters and music scores are on permanent display. The exposition contains many photos from the years he lived in the city. You can also see Jane’s telephone and Paul’s battered suitcase covered in vintage luggage labels.

Bowles transcribed and translated the oral tales of Moroccan storytellers like Mrabet and Layachi. They were fishermen who told their stories on tape in colloquial Arabic, improvising the stories as they told them. The tales were a mix of stories they made up, stories they heard in Tangier cafes and stories based on their life experiences. Some of the tales were taped in just one sitting. Most of them were heavily edited by Bowles. Choukri claimed that many of the stories by Mrabet and Layachi were rewritten by Bowles and were really a hybrid of Moroccan and American literature.   

Bowles travelled over 20,000 miles to record the tribal music of Morocco for the Library of Congress. Using a bulky tape machine, he recorded a wide variety of music. He crisscrossed the country on his recording trips and preserved for posterity a lot of indigenous Moroccan music.

Another popular spot in Tangier was Dean’s Bar. The dimly lit bar was a hangout for the smuggling crowd. You entered through a plastic string curtain and on the wall hung signed photos of Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway. The bartender Dean was an enigma. Where he came from nobody knew. He seemed to be from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Some people said he had been an Egyptian noble or a wealthy Jamaican. Others said he had been a drag queen in Paris or an opium dealer in London.

Robert Maugham said the bar was frequented by ‘bogus barons and furtive bankers.’ Burroughs described it as ‘a Celine nightmare’ with drunks ‘falling off bar stools.’ The piano in the corner was cluttered with empty glasses and scarred with cigarette burns. The journalist Robert Rourke passed through Tangier and drank at Dean’s Bar. He wrote that the regulars at the bar were smugglers, fugitives and ‘people being paid by other people to stay out of England.’    

At the bar you could meet Ian Fleming sipping a triple vodka tonic. He was in Tangier to meet with an operative who’d infiltrated a diamond smuggling ring. Fleming was writing a story about it for the Sunday Times, based on his research for the novel Diamonds are Forever. You could also meet Francis Bacon there, leaning against the counter, drinking champagne. His boyfriend Peter Lacy played piano at the bar. Lacy was a handsome RAF pilot who’d fought in the Battle of Britain. He was also a sadist who indulged Bacon’s fantasy of degradation and punishment.    

Jack Kerouac took a freighter to Tangier. He was always restless. Constantly moving from place to place, he had a feeling of not belonging anywhere. Whenever he got bored or lonely, he packed his rucksack and took off for Mexico or San Francisco or New York, hitchhiking or hopping freight trains. He wrote about his trip to Tangier in Lonesome Traveler, a book that also recounts his time working as a railway brakeman in San Francisco, sailing on a tramp steamer to Panama and working as a fire lookout in the mountains of Washington.    

Kerouac came to Tangier to visit William Burroughs and they picked up where they left off in New York a few years back. Burroughs took him around to the cafes in the medina. They bought some opium from a man in a red fez and smoked it from a pipe they made from an old can of olive oil. They drank tea at an Arab cafe, sitting near a Sufi mystic in a brown djellaba. Wandering the narrow streets of the medina, they explored the kasbah, the ancient hilltop citadel.  

During that time, Kerouac and Burrough lived at the Hotel El Muniria on rue Magellan. The budget hotel is located on the beachfront and has clean rooms with blue French windows. On the lobby wall hangs a large photo of Burroughs wearing dark shades and a fedora. The hotel is adjoined to the Tangerinn bar which was a popular hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg. Mrabet tended bar here from 1956 to 1959 and observed with some disdain the mad talk and strange behaviour of the beat writers.     

The Tangerinn is now a dark, smoky club with low tables and flat-screen TVs on the wall. Etched on the wall are quotes from Burroughs, Kerouac and Bowles. A DJ spins house music while locals and travelers mingle on a small, crowded dancefloor, drinking bottled beer and breathing second-hand smoke in the poorly ventilated club.

Jack Kerouac rented Room 8 on the roof with a terrace and view of the harbour for twenty dollars a month. Today this quiet, double room at El Muniria costs $27 a night. Room 9 is where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. The novel is a fever dream of giant centipedes and viruses from outer space, insect overlords and telepathic murder. It’s a mash-up of science fiction, erotica and pulp detective novels. The book’s depictions of drug use and gay porn resulted in an obscenity trial in the United States. 

The book begins in New York City. It shifts locations to Mexico and then to the Interzone, a place inhabited by vaudeville performers, drug merchants and control addicts like the insect people of Minraud. The novel blends Tangier with locations and cultures in South America, from a market in the medina where vendors sell orgone tanks and longevity serums to a scene in Mexico where Mayan priests morph into giant centipedes. 

Kerouac was in a reflective mood in Tangier. In the morning he meditated on the red tile patio. He read the Diamond Sutra, the Buddhist sutra about impermanence. Then he went down to the beach to watch the fishermen bring in their catch. At noon, back on his patio he looked out on the city and watched boys playing basketball in the tenements below. 

Nearby was a Catholic church. He listened to the church bells and gazed down at the priests praying the rosary while looking out to sea. He spent afternoons in his room drinking Malaga wine and reading the New Testament. In the evening he ate dinner at a cheap Spanish restaurant. At night he sat in sidewalk cafes, drinking Cinzano and later on had sexual encounters with veiled prostitutes in his hotel room.    

Burroughs kept working on his experimental novel. From his room came the clatter of a typewriter. The floor was littered with pages from the manuscript, some with coffee stains and shoe prints on them. The wind sometimes blew the pages out the window. Naked Lunch was written while Burroughs was high on majoun, using cut-ups and automatic writing. He took on different identities, believing he was an agent from another planet, writing a novel set in a land inhabited by dancing boys and centipede cults from ‘the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.’

In the book, he transformed the International Zone into the Interzone, a decadent, composite city made from fragments of Lima, New York and Mexico City. The Interzone was the frontier town of an imagined country, a place inhabited by reptilian mugwumps and pleasure addicts like the green boy-girls of Venus. Kerouac helped Burroughs type much of the manuscript despite the terrible nightmares it gave him sleeping in his rooftop room.  

The room next to Burroughs was rented by the smuggler Paul Lund. Burroughs worked every day till 4 pm and then Lund and his mates would come by and drink cognac with him. Lund regaled his exploits to Burroughs—running guns for Haile Selassie, visiting the opium dens of Cairo and running a protection racket in Blackpool, England. Burroughs was impressed by his criminal argot and used some of the stories in Naked Lunch. 

When Kerouac left Tangier, Allen Ginsberg rented his room. Ginsberg lived in San Francisco and gave poetry readings that got him some notoriety. From San Francisco he shipped out with the Merchant Marines to deliver supplies to radar stations in the Arctic Circle. He used the money earned from his maritime service to travel to Tangier.  

In Tangier he woke early to work on his poetry and then helped Burroughs arrange and edit Naked Lunch. He explored the medina streets with their white-washed walls and carved wooden doors. He hung out in cafes, lounging on mats and rugs, smoking kif and drinking mint tea brewed on brass samovars. He passed the time watching Arab boys dance to the beat of tambourines. In the late afternoon he returned to the hotel to talk with Burroughs.    

At dusk they drank sherry on the porch and watched the sun set over the Atlantic. Ginsberg enjoyed the terrace view of the harbor. On clear days he gazed out at the coast of Spain, his next travel destination. He envisioned the Moorish palaces and mosques of Andalucia—the red walls and towers of the Alhambra, the courtyard and minaret of the cathedral-mosque in Cordoba. From Tangier he travelled to the Rif mountains to see the blue-washed village of Chefchaouen.     

Paul Bowles spent the rest of his life in Tangier. From 1960 until his death in 1999, he lived on the fourth floor of Immeuble Itesa, a concrete apartment on rue Imam Kastalani. On the wall a marble plaque inscribed in English and Arabic reads, Paul Bowles, American writer and composer, lived here from 1960 to1999. Mrabet would come by at six in the evening and prepare dinner for Bowles. They would smoke kif and talk for a few hours. Brion Gysin also rented an apartment at the Immeuble Itesa. He lived there with John Giorno, the poet and performance artist who had starred in Warhol’s epic film Sleep. The six-hour film of Giorno sleeping on his back had been shot with a static camera and was considered an underground classic.   

You can also check out the Hotel Atlas on avenue Prince Heritier. This is where Burroughs stayed in 1967 and worked on his novel The Wild Boys. A maurading youth tribe, the wild boys were a pack of homoerotic teenagers who prowled the streets of Marrakech. For Burroughs, Tangier and Marrakech were hybrids of the countries he had lived in. He wrote in the novel:  

“There isn’t a place in the world you can’t find a piece of it in Marrakech, a St Louis street, a Mexican cantina, that house straight from England, Alpine huts in the mountains, a vast film set where the props are continually shifting.”

Jane Bowles moved to the Hotel Atlas with Cherifa, her elusive lover from the grain market. She stayed there because it was close to the Parade Bar. She slept all day and drank all night. Locals referred to her as ‘the crazy one.’ Truman Capote called her ‘a tortured elf.’ She drank herself into oblivion at the Parade Bar. She paid the bar tabs of random strangers who drank next to her at the bar. Hippies with their long hair and faded blue jeans had descended on Tangier. Jane met them wandering in the street and invited them back to her hotel where she gave them her clothes, jewelry and money.   

From the medina you can walk over to Cafe Hafa. Founded in 1921, it is one of the oldest cafes in Tangier. The cliffside cafe has terrace seating with plastic tables. This literary landmark was frequented by Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams. It has the same decor it had when William Burroughs sat here, drinking mint tea and writing letters to Allen Ginsberg. Servers walk by with trays of mint tea. The view of the sea is stunning and on a clear day you can see the coast of Andalusia. Travelers and locals come here to sit on the open-air terrace, drink tea and smoke marijuana, play guitar and watch the sunset.   

You can also visit the Caves of Hercules just outside Tangier. Cecil Beaton threw a beach party here that was attended by Truman Capote. The grotto was decorated with flowers, and lanterns illuminated the stalagmites. An Andalusian orchestra played on the beach. The partygoers sat around a bonfire on cushions in the sand, smoking hashish and drinking champagne cooled in the ocean. They roasted marshmallows and went for moonlit swims. 

Choukri knew this place well. As a boy, he carried contraband from smuggling ships up the cliffs. When Brion Gyson died in 1986, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered from the sea cliffs here. The entrance to the caves is only accessible at low tide. A large hole in the cave wall looks out to the ocean, and the water surges and crashes through the opening that is shaped like the continent of Africa.