Chellah

About this place

A walled archaeological site on the south bank of the Bou Regreg River where layers of history overlap: a Phoenician trading post in the first millennium BC, then a Mauretanian town, then the Roman colony of Sala Colonia, abandoned in late antiquity. In the late thirteenth century the Marinids made it a necropolis for their sultans, and in the fourteenth century they enclosed it with a new wall and a massive towered gate and built a religious complex of mosque, zawiya and tombs inside, among them the tomb of Sultan Abu al-Hasan. It declined from the fifteenth century and was damaged by earthquakes. Today you walk among the ruins of the Roman street, forum and baths, then climb to the remains of the Marinid complex and its zellij-clad minaret, where storks nest in spring, amid gardens of palms and plants. The site reopened after a restoration begun in 2021, with new visitor facilities and paths. An adult ticket costs seventy dirhams according to the official website, a hundred and twenty with the audio guide, and Moroccan citizens and residents pay half. It opens from nine to six in winter, until eight in the evening from April to September, and until three during Ramadan.