They call it the Window on the Strait, but Tangier is all along the capital of the obsession of the elsewhere. Phoenicians, Berber, Arabs, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Moroccan, Roman soldiers, nobody never knew if Tangier was an outpost of Europe in Africa or of Africa in Europe. Here people don’t come for what it is but for what it has been, for a cursed and romantic image handed down by the collective memory and nourished by cinema and literature. A place of nostalgia impregnated of ghosts of an eclectic international community of artists and western writers, from Kerouac to Ginsberg, from Matisse to the Rolling Stones, to end with Paul Bowles, whose name is is connected to Tangier forever. Today, reduced to few ghosts, the camarades of Tangier, poor African people looking for a boat towards the mirage of the Europe Fortress, the energetic atmosphere of Tangier is casting towards new plans that should make of it the “Harbour of Africa”. Tangier is divided into an old city of medieval alleyways, the Medina, with the walled kasbah of the sultan, and a new city, a tantalising introduction to a culture so different from that across the Strait of Gibraltar. Far from the exotic postcards of traditional Morocco, Tangier’s architecture is unanexpected landscape of Moroccan old towns mixed with Mediterranean European harbours of Spain, France and Italy. After many years of shadows the city again become a great place to live.