More than ten years after its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list, the rehabilitation of the Portuguese City, the historical core of El-Jadida, is still waiting. The alarm bell had, moreover, been sounded by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which made it one of its main recommendations. The mission sent by the Council had notably remarked on the absence of a precise plan for the management of the site and its surroundings. It had then strongly recommended the application, both inside and in front of the Portuguese City, of strict urban planning rules in order to preserve the visual integration of the fortifications. Currently, one sees there again only two urinals and a commemorative plaque of the famous date of the classification by UNESCO.

The City was a Portuguese trading post, built probably on the site of an ancient Phoenician trading post founded in the middle of the 5th century before Jesus Christ and known under the name of “Portus Rusibis”, recalls a history professor. Today, between Mazagan city of memory and Mazagan the Brazilian, the bridges are cut. The only relic of these ancestral times, the Portuguese City of El-Jadida was on June 30, 2004, consecrated as a world heritage of humanity during the 28th session of UNESCO, held in Suzhou in China. A year later, the site was abandoned.

One can realise the state of advanced disrepair of the walls and buildings that can collapse at any moment. And for good reason, anarchic dwellings populate the City and large families squat there. The emergency works of the first tranche, estimated at the start at some 21 million DH and launched in 2009, were in principle to be completed in 2012. But for lack of financing, these works were abandoned, because the Ministry of Finance had not validated the granting of funds to complete the first construction sites. Al Omrane had at the time started the first works while waiting for the approval of the ministry.

Today, the project is blocked and the ramparts and dwellings are experiencing a state of generalised dilapidation. According to a study commissioned by Al Omrane, the phenomenon of degradation of the whole City is accelerated by strong densification. More than 60% of the built environment is housed in precarious dwellings. The supply of external water and electricity networks in certain districts of the City is also anarchic. In more distant places, wasteland has been transformed into dumps. It is in front of this alarming situation that the local officials drew up a safeguard plan of an urgent nature.

A point of history on Mazagan: Baptised Mazagan, this new city (hence its subsequent name El-Jadida) very quickly became a commercial port of primary importance thanks to the export of agricultural products from the Doukkala region. For two centuries, the various monarchs who succeeded one another in Morocco tried to liberate the city. According to the director of the Moroccan-Lusitanian Heritage Centre, located in El-Jadida, what is more interesting for the Moroccan side are the departures of Moroccans towards Lisbon. He cites on this subject the work carried out by Ahmed Bouchareb on the displacement, in 1521, of an important community of Doukkalis towards Portugal: fleeing a terrible famine, entire douars of the region had agreed to cross the Atlantic to settle and live with the Lusitanians. A Moroccan presence confirmed moreover by Mustapha Machich Alami, who tries, through numerous trips to Portugal, to reconnect with this community and to install a cultural bridge between the two countries.