What are the best cafés in Tangier?

Tangier is a city built for sitting in cafés and watching the world (and two continents) drift by, and no café embodies that better than the Café Hafa. Clinging to the cliffs above the Strait of Gibraltar since 1921, with terraced tables stepping down toward the sea, it is the place to nurse a glass of sweet mint tea while gazing across the water to the lights of Spain. Its mystique is real: the Beat writers Paul Bowles, Kerouac and Burroughs drank here, the Rolling Stones reportedly passed through, and on a clear evening, with the sun going down over the strait, you feel every bit of that history. It is simple and a little weathered — that is exactly the charm.

Down in the medina and the streets around it, the cafés carry Tangier's extraordinary mid-century history as an "International Zone," when it was a louche, cosmopolitan free port that drew spies, smugglers, writers and artists. Café Baba is a tiny, smoky, gloriously time-warped spot in the kasbah, its walls covered in faded photos, that has been serving the same clientele for generations. It is not polished, and that is the point — it feels like stepping into the Tangier of the novels.

On the edge of the new town, the Place de France and the Boulevard Pasteur are lined with the grand old café-terraces that were the social theatre of cosmopolitan Tangier. The Gran Café de Paris, opened in the 1920s and a fixture of the city's literary and film history (it appears in The Bourne Ultimatum), is the classic of these — faded grandeur, waistcoated waiters, and a front-row seat onto the passing street. It is more about atmosphere and people-watching than great coffee, but that is true of café life here generally.

My honest guidance: come to Tangier's cafés for the setting, the history and the act of sitting, not for specialty coffee — this is mint-tea-and-a-view culture, gloriously unhurried. Do the Café Hafa at sunset as your essential one, dip into Café Baba and the medina spots for the time-capsule atmosphere, and take a terrace on Boulevard Pasteur to watch the city pass. Tangier has reinvented itself fast in recent years with a smart new port and marina, so the city around these old cafés is changing — but the cafés themselves endure. Openings and hours can be informal, so go with a relaxed plan.