From the May issue of The Sunday Times Travel Magazine

Tangier makes old hippies misty-eyed. Once they came in droves, lured by drugs and debauchery; now you can get high on atmosphere alone.

Start off at the Grand Socco (main square), lined with cafes where idlers bliss out on mint tea. Then float with the crowds into the old medina and the Petit Socco – here you’ll find bars where artist Henri Matisse and assorted low-lifes once held sway. The film Casablanca was based loosely on Tangier, which swarmed with spies in WWII, and plenty of the movie’s wheeler-dealing is still in evidence.

But don’t expect to hang around in some glam venue over glasses of Veuve Clicquot, à la Bogart and Bergman.

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To savour modern Tangier, you need to be outside, going with the flow. It’s an exotic circus: burdened donkeys barge past gnarled Berber women laying out their wares; clapped-out cars have horns permanently blaring. One minute the air is ‘filled with all the sweet perfume of Araby’, the next it’s heavy with the smell of donkey dung and spices. And the hubbub never stops: even in the Great Mosque in the medina, a loudspeaker fights against the din as the muezzins call the faithful to prayer.

Should you need a break from the racket, though, there’s always a quiet corner to be found. Take a pew in a peaceful little church. Try a pummelling in a steamy bathhouse. Or check out the view from the fortified palace on Place de la Kasbah, the city’s highest point.

Calm descends in the nouvelle ville, where a long corniche hugs a safe, sandy beach. Relax before diving back into the scrum for dinner somewhere sultry, high above the sea. The edgy Tangier of legend might have faded, but the passion and romance remain. Here’s looking at you, kid.

GREAT INDOORS

* Ravishing Islamic decoration, lustrous ceramics and tiles glimmering across every surface – the Dar el Makhzen, once a 17th-century sultan’s palace, now houses the Museum of Antiquities (Place de la Kasbah; www.maroc.net/museums; £1). The inner courtyard – a splendid leafy urban oasis – is surrounded by rooms with intricate cedar-wood ceilings, showcasing treasures of the past. Idle a while, imagining the antics that must have unravelled when it housed 40 concubines.

* Here’s a surprise: Morocco was the first country to recognise US independence, and the American Legation Museum (8 Rue Amerique; www.legation.org; free) was its first diplomatic outpost. Here, a fascinating collection includes letters between George Washington and the Sultan.

One room focuses on Paul Bowles (www.paulbowles.org), whose eerie 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky was made into a 1990 movie starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger. The American author fell under Tangier’s spell and brilliantly captured the city’s louche psyche – as do the photos of fellow artists, cafe-society beatniks and deadbeats.

* Duck in to the Anglo-Moorish St Andrews Church, on Rue d’Angleterre, by the Grand Socco square. It’s another tranquil antidote to the cacophony, with a garden of shrubs and lemon trees casting shadows over the gravestones of expats and British servicemen killed in WWII. Mustapha, the caretaker, will point out the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic above the chancel, and the gaudy reproduction of Matisse’s famous painting of the church, daubed from his hotel room opposite.

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