What was the French and Spanish colonial period in Morocco?

The colonial chapter is shorter than people expect — just forty-four years — but it reshaped Morocco physically, and you see its fingerprints everywhere. In 1912 the Treaty of Fes turned Morocco into a protectorate, with France taking the central and southern bulk and Spain controlling the north (around Tetouan and the Rif) and a strip of the far south. Tangier became a separate international zone. Crucially, the sultanate was kept on paper — Morocco never legally ceased to exist as a kingdom — but the French Resident-General held the real reins, the first being the influential Marshal Lyautey.

Lyautey's policy is why Moroccan cities look the way they do. Rather than bulldoze the historic medinas, the French built brand-new 'villes nouvelles' alongside them — wide boulevards, administrative quarters, and modern housing — leaving the old cities physically intact. That decision is the reason Fes and Marrakech still have their medieval medinas today, an accident of colonial doctrine that turned into a preservation gift. Casablanca, a minor port before 1912, exploded into the country's economic capital, and its centre is a genuinely world-class showcase of 1920s–30s Mauresque art deco that I always make time for.

The Spanish zone in the north has a different flavour you can still taste in Tetouan, Chefchaouen, and around the Rif, where Spanish lingers in older generations and the architecture and food carry an Andalusian-Spanish accent. This period also brought the railways, ports, and roads that the modern country still runs on — built, of course, to serve colonial extraction as much as Moroccans. It was not a benign arrangement: land was taken, labour exploited, and resistance, like Abd el-Krim's Rif War against Spain in the 1920s, was crushed hard.

I'm careful to give travellers the honest version, because the protectorate is living memory for older Moroccans and it directly produced the independence movement. The nationalist push grew through the 1930s and 40s, the French provoked outrage by exiling the popular Sultan Mohammed V in 1953, and the whole edifice came down in 1956. So when you sip coffee on a Casablanca art deco terrace or ride the modern train Lyautey's engineers first plotted, you're sitting inside that complicated legacy — beautiful infrastructure built under an occupation that Moroccans were determined, and ultimately able, to end.