Rabat, the city of pirates

Rabat is a clean, tidy, wide and vibrant modern city with strong ethnic characteristics! It is also my favorite place so far, because cleanliness is so rare in this country. Rabat is nestled against the Atlantic Ocean and is windy. Even at noon when the sun is shining brightly, it can still be chilly as long as the wind blows. If you come by sea by boat, you can see its tall and majestic city walls from a long distance. Its corner tower battlements and green glazed spires sparkle in the North African sun. The city of Rabat on the south bank of the estuary has experienced ups and downs in history and once declined. By the beginning of the 17th century, the city was sparsely populated and most of the houses were abandoned. A tourist wrote: "Because of the presence of wild beasts, this place was ruthlessly abandoned by the Arabs and became desolate." In 1610, 4,000 Moriscos who were expelled by the King of Spain came to the deserted Rabat. They renovated the old fort, settled down, and named it New Sierra. Deeply resenting Spain, they began to ally themselves with pirates from Algiers and Tunisia in a holy war against the Christians. This group of Serra pirates formed a fleet and plundered and attacked villages and ports along the coast of Spain, Portugal, France and Britain. They ruthlessly looted the weakly defended merchant ships passing through the Strait of Gibraltar and sold European men, women and children to North African sultans as slaves. From then on, this place became a pirate republic. It was not until the early 19th century that these pirates suffered a devastating blow from the British Navy, became unable to recover, and eventually disappeared. On the other side of the Kasbah, across the Bou Regreg River, is the walled city of Salah. Three centuries ago, those white slaves with tragic fates were driven by black slave overseers to the Kebir Market in the city with heavy chains and shackles and auctioned like livestock. The narrow alleys of Sayla remain the same as they were before, but nowadays one can buy anything in the Kebir Market except white slaves.