Casa del Mar

Casamar, also known as Port Victoria and Mackenzie's factory, was a historical coastal fort built in 1882 in Cape Juby near the city of Tarfaya in Morocco, by the founder of the British North West Africa Company, Donald MacKenzie, who positioned there early in 1879 in the goal of trading with commercial caravans coming from Timbuktu and heading to Wadi Noun. Following an attack on the fortress in 1888, the company gave up the building in 1895 to the Sultan of Morocco Moulay Abd al-Aziz, and withdrew from it after the Treaty of Cape Juby.

It was built on a sandy island and consisted of a ground floor comprising eight rooms and an upper floor that also contains eight rooms to store consumables imported and exported from the area towards the English city of Manchester, in addition to six ground tanks for potable water, and a shipping port for docking ships and commercial boats. Fortified it with war cannons to avoid any possible attack by the local Saharan tribes in Cape Juby until the full completion of the project in 1882.

Text adapted from “Casamar” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Casa del Mar ranks #5,792 of 8,134 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #26 of the 37 mapped in Morocco. Founded 1882, it is older than 5% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 607 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. See how Morocco compares in the castle statistics.

View on the interactive castle map →

Read the full history on Wikipedia ↗