Tangier Tea Ceremony - Mint Tea in the City's Legendary Cafes

No Moroccan city has a cafe culture like Tangier's. For a century the terraces looking over the strait to Spain drew writers, painters and musicians, and the ritual glass of mint tea was the centre of it all. This tea ceremony teaches the making and the meaning of Moroccan atay in the city that turned tea-drinking into an art of leisure at the gate of Africa.

You learn to brew tea the proper way - rinsing the gunpowder green tea, packing in fresh spearmint, sweetening to taste, and the theatrical pour from height that aerates the tea and builds the prized foam on each glass. The host explains the etiquette of hospitality that surrounds it, the three glasses, and how Tangier's international, Andalusian-tinged history shaped its particular relationship with the cafe and the tea terrace.

Around the tea you taste the city's Andalusian-influenced sweets and hear the stories of Tangier's storied cafes and the artists who haunted them. It is a calm, cultural experience with a strong sense of place - tea as the Tangier writers took it, slowly, with the strait and two continents in view. You leave able to brew and pour a proper Moroccan tea, and with a feel for the unhurried cafe culture that defines this crossroads city.