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Out of the shadows

The sun is bright. The air is fresh and the views are wonderful. Up the hillsides climb white villas adorned with bougainvillea. Cafe society lounges beside art deco boulevards. But this is a place whose reputation is not for elegance and healthy living but for dirty deals, illicit lust and literary nightmares.

Tangiers is a paradox because of its unique, much-coveted position. This is where Africa and the east almost meet Europe, separated by a narrow stretch of water.

With Carthaginian and Roman origins, and spates of Portuguese and English rule, this ancient city at the northern tip of Muslim Morocco looks over to Christian Spain, just 15km away across the Strait of Gibraltar.

The relationship is long and intimate. From the 8th to the 15th centuries the Moors (Muslim Africans and Arabs) ruled in Spain. Later things swung the other way: in the early 20th century Spain took control of northern Morocco, with the French taking most of the rest of the territory.

Tangiers, a port of both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, a crossroads of east and west, north and south, strategically located beside a crucial international shipping lane, was a special case. Several foreign powers joined Spain and France in taking a keen interest in it and so by treaty with the Sultan of Morocco, it became an international city.

Thus began a wild period. From 1925 until 1956, Tangiers was ruled by an international committee of western nations, which was a fine recipe for laxity and corruption. A congregation of swindlers, smugglers, spies and sex tourists earned the city a reputation.

Think of the movie Casablanca (the real one is 400km south) and you start to understand; the wonderful Rick's Cafe, built in Hollywood, was inspired by a Tangiers bar.

Tangiers became an extraordinary melting pot - or tagine, to be local - of dealers, bankers and traders of varying legality, outright villains and crooks, dreamers and drunkards, celebrities and socialites, hookers and cabaret artistes, diplomats and operatives, gun-runners and black marketeers - and latterly of artists, beat writers and Rolling Stones.

For two generations Tangiers was a byword for licentiousness and criminality. But in 1956 the city reverted to Moroccan control as part of the new independent Kingdom of Morocco. The game was up. Gradually but surely, louche and illicit Tangiers faded, though the city still drew the curious in search of forbidden pleasures.

And what remains now? A lot in physical terms, but not much in chicanery or decadence, though a whiff of sin still lingers, if you have the nose for it.

In outer appearance, Tangiers has not changed much in the half century since the international zone disappeared. The elegant French colonial-cum-art deco axis of the Rue de Belgique, Place de France and Boulevard Pasteur is still lined with crowded cafes. Narrow streets still dip steeply down to the port and the medina - the old Arab city - still huddles within its walls.

On Idlers' Terrace, where the Boulevard Pasteur's side-by-side cafes break to give a clear view of the port and the strait below, the hustlers still turn liquid eyes and a ready smile on potential customers.

Over the Rue de la Liberte gleams the white facade of El Minzah, a grand Hispano-Moorish palace of a hotel opened in 1930 and favoured by the likes of Cecil Beaton and Ian Fleming, Rita Hayworth and Errol Flynn, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, plus several deposed kings. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, the El Minzah bar was the nearest thing to Rick's Cafe Americain. It was a leading social centre of Tangiers, along with a joint round the corner run by the legendary Dean, once El Minzah's head barman.

A hole in the wall, albeit a stylish Mondrianesque wall, Dean's Bar epitomised a comment by the British journalist Kenneth Allsop: 'One's nightlife is an interesting mixture of Debrett's Peerage and the Police Gazette.' You could find the Honourable David Herbert, doyen of the expatriate community, elbow to elbow with London gangster Ronnie Kray. Dean's Bar still exists but these days the denizens are Moroccans downing Heinekens rather than bon viveurs savouring Manhattans.

The last great fling of old Tangiers was in the 1950s and early 60s, when writers and poets added their imaginative genius to the heady mixture, attracted by the cosmopolitan and liberal ambience, the dangerous aura, the relatively benign climate and the certainty of good, cheap cannabis.

Paul Bowles came first and wrote three novels set in Morocco, of which The Sheltering Sky is best known, having been turned into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. The movie opens in the classic Hotel Continental, featuring Bowles amid the exquisite mosaic tiling of its tea room.

Bowles lived high up in the medina for many years, beyond the opulent white villa of high-living Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton, who threw lavish parties there. I glean this from Ali, a friendly old man I meet in a smoky cafe. Ali leads me on a tour of the hilltop kasbah that includes Matisse's house of 1912 and those of the latest expatriate dreamers. Suddenly I realise I am going to have to pay for all this kindness - and we sharply differ on its exact value.

'The last tourist gave me 300 dirhams [HK$290],' he whines. 'Well, he was a fool, then,' I retort, shove my last offer in his pocket and jump into a fortuitously passing taxi. The car winds through some expensive real estate, including a royal palace with lush gardens, then runs down a bourgeois shopping street full of designer fashions and jewellers.

The next morning I'm on the beat trail, down the steep streets to the port. Here lived William Burroughs in the Hotel El Muniria, knocking out that seminal phantasmagoria Naked Lunch, aided and abetted by visits from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other beat writers and poets. He found Tangiers congenial, with easy access to drugs and young men.

I never make it into the El Muniria because nobody is up, which seems to fit. At night, it offers a bar called the Tangerinn, its walls plastered with beat-era photos. The Petit Socco, on the other hand, is always open. A little square in the heart of the medina, this is where the writers and beats liked to meet for a mint tea and a pipe of kif, and to chew the cud.

Delete the kif and the bohemians, add some new blinds and shiny aluminium chairs and the Petit Socco is the same. Plainly, it's going to take a North African economic miracle before Tangiers really changes its look.

Getting there: British Airways (www.britishairways.com) flies from Hong Kong to Tangiers via London. El Minzah Hotel is the grande dame and centrally located. Rates run from HK$1,225 a night for a single room.

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