A History of the Cigar in Morocco

The history of the cigar in Morocco begins neither in a tobacco field nor in a smoking lounge: it begins in a diplomatic conference hall, in Andalusia. And it passes, half a century later, through the most famous cigar smoker of the twentieth century, easel planted before the Koutoubia. Here are one hundred and twenty years of history: the story of a monopoly, of a handful of grand hotels, and of a passion that has never ceased to be handed down.

1906–1910: a monopoly born at Algeciras

When the European powers carved up their influence over the Sherifian Empire at the Algeciras conference in 1906, tobacco was on the negotiating table. The resulting Act provided for the tobacco trade to be put out to concession, and in 1910 the award handed the monopoly on manufacture and sale to a concessionary company created for the occasion, the Société internationale de régie cointéressée des tabacs au Maroc (the international leased-monopoly tobacco company), backed by the great Parisian banking houses. The principle that would govern the Moroccan market for a century was laid down: tobacco there would be a matter of state and concession, never of free trade.

The cigar, in this landscape, remained a confidential import. The country smoked otherwise, in snuff and in the sebsi, the traditional Moroccan pipe, while the Havana belonged to the European salons of Tangier, an international city where everything was negotiated and everything passed through.

The grand-hotel years: when the protectorate smoked Havanas

It was the interwar years that installed the cigar in the Moroccan scene. La Mamounia opened in Marrakech in 1923 and almost at once became the winter port of call for an international clientele of aristocrats, industrialists and writers, who brought with them their trunks, their rituals and their boxes of Havanas. The casinos, the business circles of Casablanca and the great hotels did the rest: the cigar became the accessory of the protectorate era’s evenings.

Meanwhile, Tangier was living a parallel history. An international city from 1923 to 1956, administered by the foreign powers, it largely escaped the monopoly regime: tobacco circulated there as freely as currency. Havanas could be bought in the tobacconists of the boulevard Pasteur, and were smoked in the literary cafés and hotel bars where diplomats, gentleman smugglers and the writers of the Interzone, Bowles and his visitors foremost among them, crossed paths. For three decades, then, Morocco knew two cigar regimes at once: the concession everywhere, and the free zone in Tangier. Something of that era still lingers in the Tangier lounges of today.

One regular eclipsed all the others. Winston Churchill discovered Marrakech in 1935 and made it his winter refuge: he would return all his life, paintbrushes and cigars packed in the same luggage, painting the ochre city from its terraces; the International Churchill Society documents his devotion to La Mamounia, where he stayed and painted on many occasions.

January 1943: the most famous cigar in Morocco’s history

From 14 to 24 January 1943, at the height of the world war, Roosevelt and Churchill met in secret at Anfa, on the heights of Casablanca, for what became known as the Casablanca Conference, the one that settled Allied strategy and the doctrine of unconditional surrender. In every photograph from Anfa, Churchill’s cigar is there, as present as the staff maps.

The conference over, Churchill refused to let Roosevelt depart without showing him the city closest to his heart. “You cannot come all this way to North Africa without seeing Marrakesh. (…) I must be with you when you see the sunset on the Atlas Mountains,” he is said to have told him, according to his entourage. So the two men made their way south and settled into the Villa Taylor, in the city’s diplomatic palm grove; the president, immobilised by polio, was carried up to the villa’s tower for the famous sunset. The next day, with Roosevelt gone, the Prime Minister set up his easel on the very same spot and painted the tower of the Koutoubia, the only canvas he would produce in the entire war, sent on to Roosevelt as a souvenir of the escapade. The work would resurface decades later to become one of the most expensive Churchill paintings ever sold at auction. Morocco had found its defining cigar image: a statesman, a panorama, a Havana; and the bar that bears his name today at La Mamounia piously keeps the legend alive, humidor at the ready.

1956–2011: the Régie, the state, then the turning of the page

At independence, Morocco took over the concessionary machinery: the Régie des tabacs, the state tobacco authority, became a national affair, a state monopoly over importation, manufacture and distribution, in which the cigar lived as a marginal shelf in an empire of cigarettes.

The page turned on three dates. On 2 June 2003, the state sold 80% of the Régie to the Franco-Spanish group Altadis, for 14.08 billion dirhams, one of the largest privatisations in Moroccan history, with the remaining stake following shortly after. In 2008, Altadis passed under the flag of Britain’s Imperial, which inherited the Moroccan market in the same stroke. Finally, after one last three-year extension of the monopoly, competition opened on 1 January 2011: a licensing regime, the arrival of the global cigarette groups, and the Régie’s heir (today’s Société marocaine des tabacs) keeping a central role in the distribution of the great brands, Havanas foremost among them. Almost a century to the day after the award of 1910, the monopoly expired. But its reflexes, administered prices and a closed circuit, survive it to this day.

2011 to the present day: the aficionado’s revival

The decade that followed liberalisation was, paradoxically, the one in which the Moroccan cigar stepped out of the shadows. The first La Casa del Habano boutique opened in Rabat in July 2011; Marrakech followed in 2018, Casablanca in 2019 with its club smoking lounge on Bourgogne. The palace hotels embraced their lounges, from the Royal Mansour’s cigar bar to La Mamounia’s Churchill, and Tangier regained a Havana lounge in a restored palace. A generation of Moroccan aficionados began to organise, to gather, to learn the vocabulary and the rituals.

The decade has also had its trial: the tax overhaul of 2023, which nearly quadrupled the price of prestige Havanas, pushed part of the country’s consumption towards the grey market and served as a reminder that the history of the Moroccan cigar remains, first and foremost, a fiscal one. Aficionados, meanwhile, have never been more numerous; the business press notes as much at the very moment it documents the fall in official sales: the paradox of 1910 continues to produce its effects.

And history allowed itself an elegant full circle: a Casablanca manufacture now grows and hand-rolls 100% Moroccan puros, the first factory of its kind in Africa. A century after Algeciras made Moroccan tobacco the business of foreign concessions, the country rolls its own vitolas.

What this history tells today’s aficionado

Three legacies run through the years. The monopoly first: administered prices, closed distribution. To understand today’s Moroccan market is to understand that it descends in a straight line from 1910. The setting next: the grand hotels that made the Moroccan cigar of the 1930s are, almost unchanged, the places where it is best smoked in 2026. Transmission last: from a Prime Minister on his winter sojourns to the aficionado clubs of Casablanca, the cigar in Morocco has always been the affair of insiders who welcome newcomers, which is exactly the spirit in which CIGARA writes these guides.