About This Tour
The Chellah is one of the most extraordinary and least-visited historical sites in Morocco — a walled enclosure containing a Roman city from the 1st century BC and a medieval Islamic necropolis from the 14th century AD in the same space, overgrown with wild fig trees and inhabited by hundreds of nesting storks.
The Roman site (Sala Colonia) was a thriving city of 20,000 people at the height of the empire. When the Romans left, the Merenid dynasty built their royal necropolis on top of it in the 14th century — mausoleums, a mosque and a minaret rising directly from the Roman ruins. Then both were abandoned and nature reclaimed everything.
Today the Chellah is a place of extraordinary atmosphere: Roman columns lying in wild vegetation, medieval inscriptions in Arabic above Roman doorways, storks nesting on every high point and an eerie beautiful silence that makes it unlike anything else in Morocco.