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On a clear day you can see Spain from the cliffs above Tangier -- the hills of Andalusia rising just 14 kilometers across the Strait of Gibraltar. That view has defined the city's character for millennia: Tangier is the place where two continents almost touch, where the Mediterranean becomes the Atlantic, where traders and refugees and writers and spies have all passed through or settled and left something of themselves behind.

Paul Bowles arrived in 1947 and never left, writing 'The Sheltering Sky' in the city's cafes and receiving visitors who included William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and the Rolling Stones in the years when Tangier was an International Zone -- a strange political entity from 1923 to 1956 where no single nation held sovereignty.

Cafe Hafa, opened in 1921 on a terrace above the Strait, still serves mint tea in the same tiered glasses to people who come specifically because Bowles used to sit there. The American Legation Museum in the medina houses the oldest US diplomatic property outside the United States, established in 1821.