Portuguese cistern
Interesting facts
- Accounts say the forgotten cistern was rediscovered in 1916 by a local shopkeeper who broke through a wall while enlarging his premises.
- Its vaults are of brick masonry carried on stone ribs, the Manueline signature of late Gothic building in Portugal and its overseas forts.
- The citadel above was built in 1514 by the brothers Diogo and Francisco de Arruda, incorporating an older local tower where shipwrecked Portuguese sheltered in 1502.
- When Portugal abandoned Mazagan in 1769, its last foothold in Morocco, most settlers were shipped to the Amazon and founded Nova Mazagão in present-day Amapá, Brazil.
- The emptied town was nicknamed al-Mahdouma, the ruined one, and was renamed al-Jadida, the new one, in 1820.
- UNESCO singles out the cistern and the Church of the Assumption as the most important surviving buildings of the Portuguese period.
- The star-shaped fortress around it has walls about 10 metres thick and was once ringed by a sea-filled ditch some 20 metres wide.
Why it is worth it
A single round opening in a vaulted stone ceiling lets one column of daylight drop into a dim, square hall, and a thin sheet of water on the floor turns the pillars, ribs and arches into a perfect upside-down reflection that trembles whenever a drop falls. The Portuguese Cistern lies beneath the old citadel of El Jadida, the fortified town on Morocco's Atlantic coast that the Portuguese knew as Mazagan, and it is one of the most quietly theatrical interiors anywhere on the shores of Africa.
The Portuguese first built a fort here in 1514. When it was enlarged into a full walled fortress in 1541, a chamber under the original citadel, whose earlier purpose is uncertain (it may have served as an armoury, barracks or granary), was converted to store water in case of siege. The design is credited to the architect Miguel de Arruda, with the building work entrusted to João de Castilho. The hall is roughly square, about 33 to 34 metres on each side, and its vaults rest on 25 columns and pillars set in five rows of five. The style is Manueline, the late Gothic of Portugal's age of expansion, with ribbed vaults springing from slender supports. Rainwater was gathered through the oculus at the centre of the ceiling.
Mazagan remained a Portuguese outpost until 1769, and after the garrison left, the cistern lay forgotten for a century and a half until it was rediscovered in 1916 and restored. Its play of light and water drew filmmakers, most famously Orson Welles, who shot scenes of his Othello among its columns. The Portuguese City of Mazagan, with its bastions and the cistern at its heart, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004 as an early example of European military architecture in which Portuguese and Moroccan influences met. El Jadida itself grew up around the fortress and is today a port and resort town on the coast south-west of Casablanca.
Getting there
The cistern is inside the walled Portuguese City in the centre of El Jadida, about 0.6 km from the city centre. The nearest major airport is Casablanca Mohammed V International Airport (CMN), about 86 km to the north-east. El Jadida has a railway station on the line from Casablanca.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Portuguese Cistern is a historic cistern in El Jadida, Morocco. It is located beneath the citadel at the heart of the historic Portuguese fortified city of Mazagan. It is a classified cultural heritage monument in Morocco and, along with the rest of the old walled city, forms part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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