The Portuguese Cistern of El Jadida

El Jadida grew around a Portuguese fortress town called Mazagan, built in the sixteenth century as a fortified Atlantic trading post, and the walls, bastions and sea gate still enclose a small quarter of straight streets and old churches. Its best-known interior is the cistern, a low square hall of twenty-five bays where stone columns and ribbed vaults carry the ceiling and a single round opening in the roof lets a shaft of daylight down. A few centimetres of water are kept on the floor, so the columns and the light are doubled in reflection, and the effect is why the chamber has been filmed repeatedly since Orson Welles used it in the 1950s. The fortress as a whole is on the World Heritage list as an early example of European military engineering exported overseas.

What you actually see

• The reflecting floor - a film of water doubling the columns and the roof opening.
• The vaults - twenty-five ribbed bays on squat stone columns.
• The ramparts - the sea walls and bastions of the Portuguese town above.
• The sea gate - the water gate through which the fortress was supplied.

When to go

Around midday, when the sun is high enough to send the beam through the roof opening onto the water, which is the whole point of the visit and does not happen in cloud. The ramparts are best late in the day. Summer weekends bring domestic tourists to El Jadida in numbers.

Honest expectations

The cistern is one room and the visit takes fifteen minutes; without sunlight it is simply a dark cellar. Photography is difficult in the low light and the floor edges are slippery. The rest of the Portuguese quarter is small and partly run down, and El Jadida outside the walls is an ordinary working coastal city with heavy summer crowds on its beaches.

Nearby

The Portuguese ramparts and sea gate surround it; Oualidia and its lagoon lie down the coast.