MONTHLY CHALLENGE | BLUE
Chefchaouen — The Blue City
A beautiful finish to our Moroccan adventure
It’s true. Chefchaouen is painted blue. It’s also one of the most beautiful towns I’ve ever been to. Driving into Chefchaouen in the late afternoon, we stopped on a hill beside a mosque to take it all in, and let some of it out. Yes, I was sick… very sick… and I couldn’t wait to reach our Dar and lay stretched out on a bed, hoping the bathroom was close.
We had only booked one night here as we were near the end of our two weeks driving around Morocco. I was sorry we hadn’t booked longer.
There are varying theories why the city is mostly blue.
It’s a mystery why the city has been continuously painted blue for at least five hundred years. When the city was founded around the 14th century, only parts of it were painted, and one theory goes that the wave of Jewish migrants that arrived in the 1930s only reinforced this tradition.
There’s some factual evidence of this, though, for blue represents the sky in the Jewish tradition, which this in turn equates to heaven and God, so the sizeable…
