About Oued Zem
Oued-Zem (in Arabic: وادي زم), sometimes nicknamed the martyr city, is a Moroccan town of over 90,000 inhabitants (2010), though the Oued-Zem urban area has more than 170,000 inhabitants. It is an urban community located in the Chaouia-Ouardigha region, within the Province of Khouribga.
It is situated in the centre of Morocco on the Casablanca-Beni Mellal axis, 152 km from the former and 72 km from the latter. It is also located 173 km south-east of Rabat and 250 km north-west of Marrakech.
Oued-Zem is the city of martyrs. The name of the city is composed of two words: Oued, an Arabic word meaning river, and Zem, a Berber word meaning lion, because there was only a river and a lion (Atlas Lion) that frightened the people who crossed it. For this reason, they named this region Oued Zem, or the river of the lion.
Its strategic location allowed the troops of Charles Mangin to access Khénifra via the village of Sidi Lamine near Boujaad, where the intelligence service for the surveillance of the Zayane tribes, and particularly the contingent of Mouha Ou Hammou Zayani, was based.
In the Oued-Zem region, there are various mineral deposits, notably the phosphate deposit discovered in 1921, and the iron deposit found at Ait Ammar (Beni Khayrane), which represented "1/3 of the national production in 1952".
The town itself is built at the foot of the phosphate deposits at an altitude of between 860 and 875 metres. It extends over a basin crossed by the Zem river from east to west and then towards the south.
Oued Zem also constituted an important source of water for the French military, who turned the water source into a lake shaped like the map of Paris, which they named Le Petit Paris, and they built their barracks a few steps from the lake.
The town is divided between three main tribes: Smaala, Beni Smir and Béni-Khirane, which explains the strong rural immigration towards the town and more generally towards the province.
