EnglishMilitary Architecture
Graciosa, North Africa, Marocco
Military Architecture
It was on an island on the Loukos River, around ten kilometres upstream from the city of El Araich, that the Portuguese crown decided to build from scratch a fortress and town in 1489. It was named Graciosa and was aimed at interrupting the channel of communication from Fes to the sea.
A fleet led by captain Gaspar Jusarte began the royal undertaking in March. Hostilities towards local tribes, dependent on the Wattassid king of Fes, began early on, and the Portuguese saw the insalubrity of the site. In effect, with the arrival of summer, the flow of the water course decreased, and its blockage downstream of the island was easy; hence the cutting off of the Portuguese water supply to the fortress. The unsustainability of the Portuguese post led King João II to accept an agreement with the king of Fes, on the 27th August, in which it was settled that the siege of Graciosa would end in exchange for its immediate abandonment and a return to the terms of the truce of 1471, in which the Portuguese withdrew from the blockade of other cities and towns in the kingdom of the Maghreb.
Due to the unsuitability of the geographical location of the new fortress, the original purposes of Portugal were frustrated. It witnessed failure within a few months of its first attempt to establish a fortress in North Africa. There are few remains of built heritage from this episode. An archaeological campaign in 1940 revealed foundations and springers of a stone wall regularly marked by semi-circular turrets or bastions, in the U-shape, the evidence of quick construction that indicates a structure in stone and lime for the central core and wooden palisades for the surrounding trenches. The arched stretch of the excavated wall is over 80 metres long; this shows, on the one hand, the ambition to build a town of considerable size and, on the other, the ingenuity in their knowledge of the land, given that the Portuguese were used to occupying already consolidated places.