Mustafa al-Farkhani stops outside the closed gate of the Tijaniyya shrine in Tetouan, Morocco, and holds a finger to his lips. His eyes go dim as he places his ear against the whitewashed limestone wall of the house that abuts the shrine. At first, it is imperceptible, but as our ears adjust—filtering out the footsteps, bouncing balls, and carts from the nearby commercial street—the sound emerges: a high-pitched murmur, like wind hitting leaves. There is water in the walls, flowing quietly into the adjacent shrine. Mustafa’s eyes light up, and he says: “Do you hear?”

Mustafa is legally blind, but this condition has not prevented him from working as a kanawi, a traditional plumber responsible for the upkeep of the Skundo water system. This system brings Tetouan’s underground streams to the city’s historic nucleus (known as the medina) via a gravity-driven network of interlocking clay pipes. Fitting for a man who has dedicated his professional life to the preservation of a subterranean space, Mustafa works in a shadow world: he can see some light, but he increasingly relies on touch and his acute sense of hearing to fix the Skundo pipes. Despite his blindness, he walks the labyrinthine streets of Tetouan’s medina with wide, hungry strides. He is a tall, lumbering man who wears pajama pants and black leather clogs. As he prowls the ancient streets of Tetouan’s center, it is difficult to keep up with him: he darts from pipe to pipe, stopping at each corner to greet citizens who thank him for fixing the water in their homes.

Mustafa was born in Tetouan in 1967, but his family originates in Nador, to the east on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. Today, Nador (like Tetouan) has become a popular point of departure for illegal emigration—both North African and sub-Saharan—to mainland Spain. Mustafa, however, has never considered emigrating; instead, his life has revolved around the historic center of Tetouan, where he was raised—and where he now works as a kanawi for the houses, shrines, baths, and mosques located in the compact core of the medina. Mustafa began studying to be a kanawi as a young boy—perhaps as early as eight, he recalls. His apprenticeship lasted ten years, during which time his masters—Tetouan’s two former kanawin—never allowed him to work on a pipe alone. By the time he was eighteen, Mustafa had memorized a map of the medina based solely on the flow of water.

Because the streets aren’t linear, most first-time visitors to the medina assume that the medieval urban nucleus expanded in a haphazard fashion. In fact, Tetouan’s urban planning is intimately linked with its underground streams. The fundamental building blocks of all Moroccan neighborhoods are a mosque for prayer, a public bath, and a public oven for baking bread. (The traditional Moroccan home doesn’t have an oven in the kitchen.) Both mosques and bathhouses require a constant influx of water. For this reason, the pattern of Tetouan’s medieval neighborhoods mimics the flow of water under the city. Each expansion of the medina meant, in turn, an extension of the gravity-based Skundo system. Water supply, therefore, both enabled and limited demographic developments.

No one is more aware of this relationship between plumbing and housing than a kanawi, whose training requires him to remember the source and course of each of the city’s streams. When Mustafa picks up a stone or grate to expose the plumbing beneath the streets, he can point to each pipe and tell you where it comes from and where it goes. Historically, the main deposits for the Skundo system were located in mosques or in the palaces of rich families. These mosques and families, in turn, helped to pay the salary of the kanawin and their apprentices. Today, this system of compensation has fallen apart. Most of Tetouan’s important families have relocated to Tangier or Casablanca, leaving the center of Tetouan with an abundance of decaying palaces, which have been taken over by squatters from the nearby Rif mountains. These squatters—often ten or twenty families in a one-family palace—are unable to pay the kanawin for the work done on the water tanks, which, if left dry, would stop the flow of water into the nearby residential neighborhoods. Without payment for the kanawin, the city could become waterless, but Musafa has lost a series of apprentices, because he has no money to pay them.

I first met Mustafa on a gray, unseasonably cool day in June 2008. We were introduced by our mutual friend Khalid al-Rami, a historian who recently published a book on the history of Tetouan’s plumbing infrastructure. Khalid had arranged for us all to meet at a café on Muhammad V Avenue, Tetouan’s main pedestrian drag. When Mustafa arrived, Khalid and I were already at a table, looking at samples of clay Skundo pipes that Khalid had picked up during his research. He was explaining to me the difference between the clay pipes used in Fez, and those used in Tetouan. When he saw Mustafa approaching our table, Khalid stood to greet him, introduced me, and then left us alone at the table to talk. I had already ordered a coffee and asked Mustafa if he’d like to join me, but he said, “Ad sharabt” (“I just drank one”). I had spent enough time in Morocco to know that this was just a polite way of saying “No thanks.” I tried to ask Mustafa about himself, but our conversation was awkward and slow. He seemed embarrassed to talk about himself, and when he did, he mumbled and looked at his feet. Even though I had spent a lot of time in Morocco, I had trouble understanding his thick Tetouani dialect of Arabic.

Our conversation started to open up when I asked him what sort of jobs he had been working on lately. Two days before, he had received a call from City Hall. They asked him to fix the plumbing in the Basha Mosque, adjacent to the royal palace complex, in preparation for the impending arrival of the king, Muhammad VI. Unlike his father, Hassan II, who went to Tetouan only once during his entire thirty-eight year reign, Muhammad VI now spends his summers there, perhaps to redress his father’s legendary neglect of the North. Mustafa agreed to do the job at the Basha Mosque, but later in the day, they called back to tell him that he had to perform the work at night so that people wouldn’t see him coming in and out of the palace. Since Mustafa’s failing eyesight prevents him from working at night, he had to turn down the project. City Hall ended up calling the local utilities company, Amendis, whose plumbers are notorious for sabotaging the clay Skundo pipes in order to force people to use their infrastructure. “I don’t know what they’ll do when the king comes,” Mustafa mused.

Tetouan lies ten kilometers from Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, southeast of Tangier. Due to this strategic position, near the mouth of the Mediterranean and at the maritime crossroads of Europe and Africa, the city has been at the center of a clash between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa for centuries. Around the time Columbus sailed west toward the New World, a band of exiles from the Muslim kingdom of Granada (which had just fallen to the Catholic monarchs of Spain) founded Tetouan. As Spain and Portugal fought to control Morocco’s coast throughout the sixteenth century, piracy provided Tetouan with steady streams of Christian captives, who joined black Africans in the city’s bustling slave market. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tetouan was the theatre of a series of wars between Spain and Morocco, which eventually led to the creation of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco (1913–1956). Tetouan was the administrative and commercial capital of the Protectorate and the visible symbol of Spain’s last attempt to establish an African empire.

Tetouan lies in the foothills of the Rif mountains, and nearby Mount Dersa, which towers over the historical center of the city, provides not only majestic views of the surrounding Martil valley, but also a strategic lookout to prevent maritime attack. The streams that descend from Mount Dersa cut into the permeable calciferous rock formations on which the city stands. Over many millennia, this process of attrition slowly eroded Tetouan’s foundation, leaving a dense network of subterranean caves that spreads out across the city.

These caves have, like the streams that created them, played an important role in Tetouan’s history. Starting in the early sixteenth century, they were used as prisons for the Christian captives of Tetouani pirates. Contemporary European accounts of these caves depict them as hellish dungeons. Leo Africanus, a famous sixteenth-century North African convert to Christianity, wrote Description of Africa, a European best-seller, in which he documents his visit to Tetouan’s caves. There, he saw “three thousand Christian slaves wearing wool sacks and sleeping in dug-out holes, all of them chained down below the earth.” At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Cervantes illustrated the fame of Tetouan’s subterranean prisons when the henpecked protagonist of his entr’acte The Divorce Judge compares his marriage to “captivity in Tetouan’s caves.” Spanish Franciscan monks made frequent diplomatic visits to Tetouan in order to negotiate the Christian captives’ freedom. They also built a small subterranean church, Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows), where they would celebrate mass for the prisoners. This humble sanctuary lies five meters under the medina’s main commercial thoroughfare, al-Mutamir, which takes its name from the underground tunnels that run beneath it.

In 1922, a team of Spanish archaeologists, led by Cesar Luis de Montalban, uncovered the remains of this sixteenth-century church. Aware of the archaeological and historical significance of this discovery, the Protectorate government commissioned Carlos Ovilo, a Spanish-trained architect born in Tangier, to visit the site and study the viability of more extensive excavations. Ovilo concluded that excavation could not continue without seriously compromising the structural stability of the commercial thoroughfare above it. After Ovilo’s official visit to the underground prison and church, neither the Spanish Protectorate nor the Moroccan authorities made any attempt to excavate the site, despite the potential interest to tourists of a sixteenth-century church buried underneath the streets of a medieval Islamic city. Today, its only remnant is a small metal hatch, covering barely a square meter of ground between a popular juice stand and a coffee shop. Hundreds of people step on the metal hatch each day, without knowing what lies below. The only souvenir of Ovilo’s descent into Tetouan’s netherworld is a detailed sketch of the site that he produced for Montalban’s archaeological report.

In 1917, just a few years before Ovilo’s expedition to Tetouan’s underground, the Protectorate government had hired him to design a colonial annex to Tetouan’s historic nucleus. This annex, which became known as the Ensanche (“expansion”), originates at the walls of the ancient medina and spreads out in neat, rectangular blocks of near uniform size. Ovilo’s Ensanche harkens back to the homogeneous and Neo-Classical aesthetic of late-nineteenth-century Spanish architecture. Both its name and its design evoke the eponymous Eixample (Catalan for “expansion”) of Barcelona, designed by Ildefons Cerdà in 1859. Cerdà’s design for the nineteenth-century expansion of Barcelona was based on a grid system, which was intended to facilitate traffic flow and symbolize a rational and democratic city. Cerdà later formally articulated his belief in the connection between democracy, modernity, and rational urban design in his General Theory of Urbanization (1867), a seminal text for urban designers, who consider it the origin of the word “urbanism.” Like Cerdà’s Eixample, Ovilo’s Ensanche attempted to bring rational design to Tetouan’s urban chaos. Ovilo envisioned the Ensanche’s rectangular blocks and clean lines as an urban symbol of the new colonial order and also as a rebuke to the streets of the medina, which follow the aleatory flow of underground water. Whatever Ovilo’s intentions were, the construction of the Ensanche had the effect of creating a two-tier city: a ghettoized medina for the Muslim “natives” and a modern annex for the Protectorate officials and the local aristocracy (both Muslim and Jewish) that worked with them.

Carlos Ovilo continued to design buildings in Tetouan until his death in 1952, and the evolution of his style reads like a textbook narrative of early twentieth-century Spanish architecture: the homogeneous neo-classicism of his early period (1917–1931) gives way to the movement and modernist rationalism of his Republican period (1931–936), which is followed by the eclectic blend of Arabesque and vernacular Spanish elements during the Francoist period (starting in 1936). During his Republican period, he built the Casino Israelita (the Jewish Casino) on Muhammad V Avenue for Tetouan’s Spanish-speaking Jewish elite. Today, Tetouan’s Jews number fewer than fifty, but its Jewish population was once one of the largest and most vibrant in North Africa—earning the city the sobriquet “Little Jerusalem” among Sephardic Jews. This fame lasted until the Sephardic exodus, which began with the foundation of Israel (1948) and escalated after Moroccan independence (1956). After the Tetouani Jewish population dwindled, the derelict Jewish Casino was converted into the Public Library, which continues to hold the largest collection of documents, photographs, and memorabilia about the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco. Likewise, Ovilo’s oeuvre—which spreads to the medina’s netherworld, the Protectorate’s colonial annex, and the Jewish elite’s watering hole—can be read as a “public library” of the Protectorate itself, an archive of the city’s unsuccessful attempts to manage the interaction between three religious and cultural communities.

As part of its effort to modernize Tetouan’s infrastructure, the Protectorate authorized public works projects in the medina. One of these projects laid down the modern pipes that today belong to the public utilities company Amendis. These pipes were meant to supplant the clay pipes that had traditionally delivered the mountain water to the medina through a gravity-powered system of distribution. From then on, the Spanish referred to the clay pipes as a segundo (secondary) source of water. Implicit in this name was the suggestion that the clay pipes carried water of inferior quality. The name stuck—albeit in a deformed pronunciation (Skundo)—but the Spanish were not successful in eradicating the city’s autochthonous plumbing structure. Instead, they merely created a two-class system of water distribution, in which some households and institutions used the “primary” (modern and “clean”) water, while some continued to use the “secondary” water. Alongside this two-tier system of water distribution, there emerged a two-class system of plumbers: some worked on the modern pipes (today, operated by Amendis), while some (the kanawin) worked on the clay pipes.

This two-class system of plumbing continues in Tetouan, and Mustafa al-Farkhani is the last living member of a guild of plumbers that stretches back to the city’s late fifteenth-century origins. For the past decade, however, Amendis has lobbied the municipal government for total control of water distribution in Tetouan’s medina. In order to counterbalance Amendis’s clout, the local government of the Spanish region of Andalucia granted a large sum of money—rumored to be two million euros—to Tetouan’s city government in order to fix up the Skundo system and help preserve the city’s unique Andalusian heritage. Some small part of this money was supposed to help Mustafa find and train an apprentice. Nevertheless, more than a decade has passed, and he has never seen any of the money. Local leaders suggested to me in private that the money was embezzled. In a city rife with corruption, largely driven by the Rif drug lords, the disappearance (or embezzlement) of a government grant for plumbing is hardly front-page news. As city leaders stressed to me time and time again, the problem with Tetouan’s rehabilitation is not funding, which has been abundant since the city was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, but rather good governance. A few times, City Hall has hired Mustafa to work on Skundo pipes and encouraged him to bring along an apprentice. After a few months of work without pay, though, the apprentices inevitably look for a job elsewhere.

As part of its struggle for a monopoly on Tetouan’s water supply, Amendis has established a well-documented habit of sending its plumbers on “reconnaissance” missions in the medina, where the plumbers intentionally break the clay pipes that connect residential and religious water supplies. Mosques, which require water for ritual ablutions, are facing pressure from Amendis to abandon the Skundo system and adopt the modern pipes. One way the company has of forcing the religious leaders into compliance is by asking its plumbers to destroy the old pipes. Historically, the endowment of religious institutions has been an important source of funding for the upkeep of the Skundo system and the salary of the kanawin. Amendis’s systematic sabotage of the pipes, however, has made the mosques an unreliable patron.

A stroll through the medina at Friday prayer time will illustrate to any visitor the continued vitality of the city’s mosques, but they are in a bind about how and from whom to get their water. The desperation of this situation sunk into me one day as Mustafa and I walked by the Erzini mosque, which has been without water since early 2008. That winter, the Amendis plumbers broke the Skundo pipes to the mosque, and ever since then, the mosque has been in the middle of a stand-off between civic organizations lobbying for the preservation of the Skundo system and the corporate interests of Amendis. In the meantime, the neighborhood residents are forced to choose between entering the mosque in a state of cultic impurity or seeking out another congregation in a different part of the city.