Jewish Cemetery of Chefchaouen

Chefchaouen’s Jewish community was largely made up of megorashim, Jews expelled from Spain, and kept Judeo-Spanish as its language. Its mellah is said to have been built in the same period as Tetouan’s, first outside the walls near the river and later inside the town near the gate called Bab el Mellah. Charles de Foucauld, who visited in disguise around 1883, described Jews as about a third of the population.

In 1924 just over 200 of the town’s roughly 2,000 houses belonged to Jews, who worked as merchants, tanners, cloth traders and silversmiths. Families from Rif villages arrived between 1927 and the early 1930s. Two local writers link the town’s blue-painted houses to these arrivals; it is a widely repeated account rather than a documented fact. The town had at least three synagogues before the Spanish Civil War. Emigration began in the 1940s, to Tetouan, Ceuta, Melilla, Venezuela and Israel, and the last families left in the 1950s, or by another account in 1968.

The cemetery holds two kinds of tomb. The oldest are large, barely worked blocks of limestone, thought to date from the generations after the expulsion from Spain. Later tombs are anthropomorphic, shaped with a rounded head and no inscription, and some of the more prominent ones are decorated with concentric circles. They resemble the old Castilla section of the Jewish cemetery of Tetouan.

A local custom, unusual in Morocco, was to carve the face of the dead person into the stone. Most of these faces have worn away and only a few survive. There is also a group of about a hundred newer tombs in neat rows, which a 2012 account described as completely neglected.

Since then the cemetery has been fenced with railings and turned into a small park, which local people use as a path through to another part of town. A visitor in March 2026 reported that the carved symbols are becoming harder to make out.

The cemetery sits at the edge of town and is easy to combine with the Chefchaouen mellah. Because it doubles as a park, the exact access arrangement is unclear, and we confirm it locally before a visit. However public it looks, it is still a burial ground: walk on the paths, do not climb on tombs or touch the fragile carvings, and dress modestly. No list of named graves has been published, so we cannot promise to locate a particular family grave here.