Morocco · 16th century
Mazagan (Portuguese: Mazagão) is the former name of the present-day town of El Jadida, a fortified city built by the Portuguese at the beginning of the 16th century on the coast of Morocco, which was retaken by the Moroccans in 1769. The fortifications of the Portuguese city, with their bastions and ramparts, are an early example of Portuguese Renaissance military architecture.
The Portuguese monuments still visible are the Portuguese cistern, the Portuguese fortress and the Church of the Assumption, built in the Manueline style. This town is one of the first settlements on the Portuguese explorers' route to India, and it offers an exceptional testimony to the mutual influences between European and Moroccan cultures.
On 30 June 2004, at the 28th session of the World Heritage Committee, held in Suzhou, China, the Moroccan town of Mazagan (El Jadida) was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List.
Machine-translated from “Mazagan” on the French Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Mazagan ranks #2,224 of 9,035 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #8 of the 41 mapped in Morocco. Founded 1502, it is older than 42% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 886 atlas entries founded in the 16th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 3,022 times in the last 60 days, more than 78% of the atlas. See how Morocco compares in the castle statistics.
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