Mazagan
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How it came to be
Mazagan stands on Morocco's Atlantic coast, about 90 km southwest of Casablanca. In 1502 the Portuguese captain Jorge de Mello landed here and took refuge with his crew in an old tower. In the summer of 1514 the Portuguese built a rectangular citadel with four towers around it, designed by the brothers Diogo and Francisco de Arruda.
When the Saadians began driving the Portuguese from their coastal forts, above all from Santa Cruz (now Agadir) in 1541, King João III abandoned Azemmour and Safi and expanded Mazagan into a larger walled fortress. Its bastions and ramparts are an early example of Renaissance military design, a response to modern artillery. In the same year a chamber beneath the citadel was converted into a cistern; the cistern and the Church of the Assumption are built in the late Gothic Manueline style.
In 1769 Portugal gave up Mazagan, its last territory in Morocco, and most of its inhabitants were sent to Brazil, where they founded Nova Mazagão. The town passed to Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah and lay largely empty until it was rebuilt in the 19th century and renamed al-Jadida, 'the New', in 1820. It was inscribed in 2004; in the earthquake of September 2023 cracks appeared in the church tower.
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