Postcards from the capital of the Oneiric Republic

Morocco is shot through with a dreamlike essence. In the Medinas the concepts of inside and outside are blurred and forgotten, every straight line bends, and no 'street' ends up in the place the direction of travel promises. In Tangier I once took 20 minutes to walk down an empty alley in one direction, but only 3 minutes to walk back to the start. Time and space become slightly wibbly wobbly, and every moment in history is happening now. People talk on phones whilst riding mopeds down medieval streets lined with shops that haven't changed in the last 100 years, and in the mountains, the only change that the centuries have begotten is that even in villages without electricity, someone, somewhere, will be showing the football.

On my first trip to Morocco 12 years ago, I landed in Marrakesh and was hit by the blunting effects of culture shock. I quickly headed up into the mountains, where some confusion with my grand taxi driver led to me getting out in the wrong village, one having no truck with that interloper, electricity. That night, wandering streets lit only by moonlight, a man in full pointy-headed djelleba came out of a door directly in front of me, swinging a brazier of hot coals from a long iron chain. As he briskly turned and walked away the brazier swung out and sent up a great chorus of sparks, swaying and dancing towards their sisters in the stars. Straight away, with a rush, the culture shock melted away and I realised I was here, in this place, and in this place, this was what passed for reality.

​But one of the other places I visited on that holiday holds a special place for me in the pantheon of Moroccan dream factories: Sidi Ifni. This bijoux clifftop town by the sea had briefly been the capital of Spanish West Africa, a country so few have heard of that even the Spanish call the liberation struggle The Forgotten War. Still, this brief moment in the sun had graced Sidi Ifni with some low key Art Deco gems riffing on the local vernacular style. If I'm honest, they're fairly nondescript - a few nice details here and there - largely because Moroccan architecture is basically stripped down Art Deco itself. It's just an exceedingly pretty little place where, weirdly, hardly anyone seems to live. Despite being small, the wide streets are often fairly empty, and there's no buzz of mopeds or even cars to contend with. It's peaceful and comfortable in a way so little of urban Morocco manages. It's rather haunting, a forgotten architectural gem lost to the world, crying out for its ownGarcía Márquez.

This was the most luxurious hotel I stayed in on this trip, but sadly access to the church next door was no longer possible.

Still, it has a lovely beach, which is accessed walking down steps past the old jail in the shape of a stylised ship. Splashing in the Atlantic breakers I came across the other oneiric aspect of Sidi Ifni. It has a microclimate that causes lots of brief but dense mists to arise. Combined with the bright, bright, Bright sunshine, it has an effect I've never experienced before. Turning back to face the cliffs, I watched the town slowly drift out of existence, buildings fading, then disappearing, one by one.

Not quite the full effect, from the other end of the beach.

​If you're going for a walk in Sidi Ifni, there's two obvious directions to choose. You can walk down the beach to the abandoned port you can see to the left, or you can walk up the beach to the abandoned fort you can see in the photo at the top of this post. Nothing calls to me so much as the slow decay of things lost, and the first time I visited I'd spent a happy day clambering around the old machinery and cable car at the port, so this time I decided to head up and poke around the fort.

Despite it being January, the beach was hotter than I had expected, with the mist making it wicked humid. By the time I had reached the climb up to the fort I needed a break. As I looked for some shade to sit in I saw the rocks were scattered with wooden fetishes, more or less human in shape, and generally of a benevolent spirit. The mystery was soon solved when a voice called from a shallow cave, beckoning me in to have some tea with him as he continued whittling. I don't share the same belief most Moroccans have about the restorative powers of super sweet heavily brewed green tea, but the shade was inviting enough that I thought it would be worth what I presumed would be the hard sell to follow.

But none came. This nut-brown old man spent most of his days down here carving these sculptures not because he wanted to palm them off on tourists, but simply because the wood kept washing ashore. He was happy of the company, but was focused on his knife, trimming and scraping until he was satisfied. Suitably refreshed, I left, but he barely noticed my passing.

It wasn't too much of a climb up the cliffs to the fort, and now that the mist had burned off, it didn't feel too hot either. The fort impressed me with its bleak modernity, allowing me to take my favourite kinds of photos from the outside. I walked along the cliff edge trying to find a way in. Yet although there were places here and there where people had clearly piled up stones to get over the high walls, whenever I climbed up and looked I never saw a way to get back out.

Don't know what you're talking about. I've never heard of Gursky...

I walked round the front, and, of course, found the gate open. I stopped to photograph it for a series of photos I'm doing about rusty gates (book your tickets now, I'm sure it will be wildly popular!), at which point I heard shouting. From far, far away, a man in military gear was running towards me, bellowing as he crossed the stony desert. It seems his one job, sat alone in a guard box miles from anywhere, was to guard this empty fort, and this was his chance to do something! As soon as I apologised and acted in a non-spy-y manner, he calmed down, and I walked away a little sad that I didn't get time to examine the interior. Some of my favourite ever photos were taken in an abandoned fort lost in the hills of the Middle Atlas. I really should get around to getting them online.

Cool and the gang hang out on the steps of the lighthouse - the word for lighthouse and minaret is the same in Arabic.

Rush hour in the town centre

I always seem to be just on the verge of parsing this graffiti but it keeps just slipping away.

The 'airport'

The whole town is built around the 'airport', a large stony expanse that occasionally hosts impromptu football matches, prayer sessions, or markets for out-of-towners. The only real indication anything was here are the street lamps that don't work.

​It gets fairly short shrift on google with a lot of 1 star reviews as it was abandoned four decades ago:

"​Only recommend landing here if your engines have failed and you won't make it to a actual airport. No one in control tower."

Yet all the roads lead to it, and the edges are lined with cafés where you can sit and stare at the emperor's new airport, waiting for contact from the outside world, waiting to be sure that we're on the same plane of existence. The capital of a country that barely was, the dreams of a fading empire, a liminal space, a border between our world and something other. It's easy to forget that people live here and that this is their normal and not a metaphor or a half memory.

I take breakfast each morning in Le Café des Artistes, just round the corner from the Shake Shack, a nightclub and tiki bar that looks like it hasn't been open since tiki bars were a thing. It overlooks the old cinema whose doors remain firmly shut as well. The staff don't mind that I have their breakfast spread at 11. I don't mind that when a mist forms, the rest of the town drifts away, and I'm left drinking coffee alone in the void.

For a long time I thought I wanted to winter somewhere depressing by the sea, to watch the grey sky churn up the waves that  smash against endless concrete. It turns out that there's a lot of joy to be found in the simply melancholy. Sidi Ifni is a ghost, and sometimes the effort of being real is just too much for it to take. But even if it barely troubles existence, I can always visit it when I close my eyes. Our little life may be rounded with a sleep, but as long as dreams are made of uncut Morocco, I have much less to fear.