My beautiful (Moroccan) hotel

Along time ago my university boyfriend, a mad scientist who helped put the men on the moon, spotted an advert in Gibraltar for day trips to Tangier. And so we landed in a single-engine plane on a grassy strip surrounded by perfumed wildflowers in the legendary haunt of artists, writers and ne’er do wells - only to be stranded overnight by the famous straits fog that descends suddenly out of a clear blue sky.

The airline BOAC – yes, it was that long ago – put us penniless students up in one of the world’s most evocative hotels, the Minzah. Built in 1930 by Lord Bute, it became the postwar haunt of such largerthan-life personalities as Aristotle Onassis and Rita Hayworth.

Outside, there were lepers in the still unmade dusty streets. Inside, fountains played in the tiled courtyard and roses and agapanthus bloomed in a garden which overlooked the port on one side and the restless town on the other.

Was it then I decided hotel living was the only way to go? Space plus privacy, a bar on tap, 24- hour room service and if the roof leaks it’s not your problem. Over the years, others have come to this conclusion. Warren Beatty lived in the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles. Colette eked out her days in the Negresco in Nice.

Somewhere along the line, I decided to do the same but I never dreamed it would be in my own hotel.Then, three years ago, I bought two rickety adjacent houses attached to the 15th century Kasbah wall in Tangier just fifty yards from where Samuel Pepys had lived when trying to administer the rebellious town for Charles II. Pepys gave up. In the face of marauding brigands he torched the harbour and went back to his Fleet Street wenching.

What a missed opportunity, I thought. If only he’d hung on, the English could have owned the entire gateway to the Med because within 20 years they had Gibraltar on the other side. No warring tribesmen now – how difficult could it be to get my crumbling stones, some dating back to the 13th century, into shape? After all, old buildings were my passion. I live in one in London. I’d been a councillor for the West End for some twenty years, specialising in planning. In fact, Tangier reminded me so much of my London stomping ground I had already nicknamed it Soho-on-Sea.

And so I pictured contented guests eating méchoui lamb in my rooftop restaurant overlooking Spain to the sound of Gnaoui music, carousing in my vaulted bar downstairs, unwinding in my hammam, drinking mint tea in my cafe overlooking the fishing port, or simply relaxing in their suites to the whir of colonial fans.

To oversee this dream, I rented an apartment with a sea view near the French consulate and engaged an architect recommended by one of the king’s relatives and a builder who said he knew all about the Kasbah. Soon I was asked to join a commission advising on the refurbishing of the old town. I gave a speech in front of the Wali - the local governor - and forty luminaries about my intentions. ‘If you bring me tourists,’ said the Wali. ‘I will give you permission tomorrow to make your houses into a hotel. What will you call it?’ ‘Al Zaytouna,’ I said on the spur of the moment, after the square next door. It means the olive tree. ‘Oh that’s a blessed name, ‘said the Wali. ‘This is a blessed enterprise. It will be very successful.’

That was in pre-Covid days. No sooner was the ink dry on the sale than Morocco was shut down, the entire town hall got Covid and no-one was allowed to leave their house except to buy provisions. I daydreamed a lot during those early days alone with my single electric burner and Sky TV. I chose tiles and furniture from the internet, found Holler prints in the British Museum from Pepys’s time to hang in the foyer, reconfigured the doors and windows and decorated the seven suites individually, naming them after far flung desert cities. I applied for planning permission. Then it started raining.

When it rains in Tangier it’s not just a light trickle. You may think of it as a hot summer place, but that’s in summer. Now seagulls were swimming on my patio where previously the lavender had bloomed and, as for the hotel, the cracks in the mud walls surrounding the courtyard were beginning to yawn. I went to see the Caid, the functionary in charge of the Kasbah. ‘You need the Wali,’ he said. ‘But I have his permission.’ ‘You need it in writing.’

You have to give the Moroccans credit for holding their nerve. ‘If the cracks are not vertical or horizontal all will be OK. Inshallah,’ said the Wali’s right hand man. By now, the water was coming up through the floor. ‘What shall we do?’ I asked the architect. ‘We can’t do anything without planning permission,’ he said. ‘It’s a listed building.’ I sent pictures to the town hall begging for permission. ‘Ah,’ they said, ‘yes, you must have it immediately.’ But nothing happened. I wrote to the British Embassy in Rabat. The Moroccans admired the ambassador’s wafer thin embossed blue paper but didn’t budge. ‘Is this a question of money?’ I asked the architect. ‘Madame,’ he replied, ‘I am a professional with a reputation.’

And so I muddled through the winter sustained by Tahir Shah’s wonderfully funny book The Caliphs House. A British author with Afghani antecedents, he had renovated a wreck in Casablanca complete with live-in djinns ready to scupper the project. I only had cats and cockroaches. No sooner did the elusive permission arrive than the builder announced my houses had no foundations and would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

His French, the Moroccan lingua Franca, was not good at the best of times. My Arabic did not stretch to RSJs. And so we haggled by Google translate. And then he tore the walls down. Where previously I had had a tired if habitable property, I now had a hole in the ground.

The architect watched nervously as the largely African workforce wielded their masonry hammers.

‘This is tricky,’ said the architect. ‘One wrong blow and the whole neighbourhood will collapse.’ Indeed a similar old house in the medina, where the buildings piggyback on each other like Brazilian favelas, had done just that. ‘The town is committed to reinforcing them,’ the Caid reassured me when I alerted him to a similar at risk property leaning perilously over my hammam. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but when?’

Stopping on my way home for a Syrian takeaway, I bumped into a dashing TV presenter fluent in four languages. ‘Sometimes I think there is no word for urgent in the local Arabic,’ I confided. He smiled. ‘What is the word for urgent?’ I asked. ‘There is none,’ he replied.

Pretty soon I was banned from the site. All the workmen had Covid they said. So it would be dangerous for me to attend. Once vaccinated and suitably masked, I was soon back on site, walking through streets that were now strangely unfamiliar. The Moroccans used the lockdown to embellish Tangier. New cedar blinds for the shopkeepers, new cobblestones in the medina, new street signs and playgrounds for the kids, a state of the art cancer hospital, and new cinemas where the films came out before they did in London. All sprung from nowhere. They had built a 21st which bore no resemblance to the dusty piece remembered from my student years.

My hole in the ground suddenly started to look like, if not yet an investment at least

My property has now been rebuilt with foundations that could support the Empire State Building, according to my expat-American builder neighbour. But wait, the little house that clings to my hammam is still hanging by a fingernail.

So will we open this year? My optimistic hotel manager assures me we will. ‘And then I will do everything for you, Madame Glenys. You will do nothing but sit on the terrace with a gin and tonic in one hand and a leopard on a diamond chain in the other. And people will come from all over the world to see this crazy English woman.’

Al Zaytouna will open in summer 2023 - inshallah