01 Two cities on the same ground
In most cases, one of the two layers wins. Either the ancient site is preserved and what came later is demolished, or the medieval city stays inhabited and the Roman remains buried beneath it. Here neither happened: the medieval enclosure was abandoned, the modern city grew elsewhere and the whole thing was left as it was.
The result is that you walk on Roman paving while looking at a fourteenth-century ochre wall, and both fit in the same photograph with no effort of framing. It is the kind of place that explains a thousand years of urban history without needing a single sign.
02 The lower one: Sala Colonia
The Roman city occupied a rise above the Bou Regreg valley, a site chosen for the usual reasons: control of the river and the route. What is visible of it today are rectangular footings, perfectly aligned courses of ashlar and, above all, stretches of paved street that let you follow the layout on foot.
You walk down a Roman street and look up at a wall built a thousand years later. Nothing has to be imagined.
That legibility is what surprises most. At many sites you have to mentally reconstruct what was a street from two aligned stones. Here the paving is intact over long stretches, with its kerbs in place, and the city's grid is easy to make out.
03 The upper one: the fourteenth-century wall
Centuries after the Roman city was abandoned, the Marinids raised their own enclosure here: an ochre wall with horseshoe-arched gates, square towers and carved decoration still preserved on some panels. It is the silhouette you see from a distance as you approach the site.
The relationship between the two layers is physical and quite literal. The medieval wall rests on and adapts to the relief left by the earlier city, and at some points it reuses Roman material directly. It is not a restoration or a museum display: it is a construction made with what was to hand.
There is also a third layer that is not human and has become the site's image: the storks. The tower tops are occupied by bulky nests of dry branches, some very large, and the birds come and go while you walk the site.
04 How to see it
It is a couple of kilometres from the old core, to the south, and it is a short visit: an hour and a half is enough to walk it calmly. The useful way to do it is to start at the top, beside the enclosure gate, for the overall view, and then come down to the level of the Roman paving.
Light matters more than usual. The golden limestone and the orange lichen on the blocks catch fire in low sun, and at midday the whole thing flattens out considerably. Late afternoon is clearly the best moment, and it also coincides with the storks' activity.
.jpg?width=1200)
And it is worth fitting it into the city as a whole, because that is what gives it meaning. Rabat has been on the World Heritage list since 2012 as 'modern capital and historic city', for its 1197 walls and its 1913 extension. Chellah adds two more layers below, and none of the four covers the others.
.jpg?width=1600)
.jpg?width=1600)
