Tetouan is a city of northern Morocco on the Mediterranean side of the Rif foothills, forty kilometres south of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Berber name Tiṭṭawin glosses literally as "the springs," from a root productive across north Africa for water-source toponyms; the modern Spanish and French Tétouan and the Arabic Tiṭwan preserve the same root with predictable phonological adjustment.
The medieval Marinid town was destroyed by Henry III of Castile in 1399 and refounded around 1484 by Andalusi exiles from Granada under the leadership of the Marinid emir Sidi al-Mandari. The new settlement absorbed successive waves of Andalusi-Morisco refugees through the seventeenth century, giving Tetouan the strongest Andalusi architectural and culinary signature of any Moroccan city. The medina, inscribed by UNESCO in 1997, is the most intact Andalusi-Maghrebi urban fabric outside Granada itself.
Under the Spanish Protectorate (1912–1956) Tetouan served as the capital of the Northern Zone of Morocco, with the Spanish High Commission and an extensive Spanish-period extension of the colonial city. The protectorate-era nueva ciudad, with its rationalist civic architecture and palm-lined avenues, sits adjacent to the medina without integrating into it.
The contemporary city is the regional capital of the Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima administrative region. Its Andalusi craft tradition — leather, embroidery, brass, woodwork, and the distinctive Tetouani decorative ceramics — remains commercially active, and the Royal Institute of Music continues the long Tetouani Andalusi musical tradition (al-ala) that descends directly from Granadan court music of the late medieval period.