Chefchaouen is a Moroccan mountain town painted blue from doorstep to rooftop, and no two walls are quite the same blue. Climb the medina and the shade changes at every turn. A brass-studded door is deep indigo, a stairway comes close to turquoise, a wall has faded to the pale of a winter sky, and geraniums and hanging rugs break it all with warm colour. Residents keep it that way, repainting by hand with lime and pigment. There is no single viewpoint here; the town is the view. Two bare peaks of the Rif stand straight above the rooftops and give the place its name, from the Amazigh word for horns. The blue itself is recent: photographs from the 1930s show patches, not the wall-to-wall indigo people now fly in for.
The town began in 1471 as a hillside kasbah, raised by Ali ibn Rashid al-Alami against Portuguese raids on the coast. It then filled with Andalusi Muslims and Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain, who brought the tiled roofs, the arches and the lime-washed lanes you still walk. Chefchaouen stayed shut to outsiders for nearly 450 years after that. Only three Westerners are known to have got inside before Spanish troops walked through the gates in 1920. Charles de Foucauld came disguised as a rabbi in 1883; an American, William Summers, was caught and poisoned in 1892. At the medina's top edge the Ras el-Maa spring pours straight out of the mountain, and women still bring washing down to its stone channels. Half an hour above town stands the roofless Spanish Mosque, and from it the whole blue sprawl reads as one piece at sunset. Some 46,000 people live here, and the slopes behind them are Talassemtane National Park, green and flowering through April and May, when the Akchour cascades run at full force.