Tangier, Morocco

Some grooms would be perfectly happy with a goat or two or even a bottle of top shelf malt whisky as their dowry, but when he married Catherine of Braganza, Charles II got Tangier as part of the package deal. Before that the city had been passed from empire to empire more often than a three dollar bill, along the way acquiring, like Casablanca, Marrakech and Fes, a reputation for the exotic and the romantic.

This reputation was only enhanced when, in the 1920s, it became an international zone hosting eight countries, three languages, two currencies and a barrel load of illegal high jinks. This wild playground of permissiveness was a siren call to America's 1950s literary riff raff who promptly turned their backs on the white-picket-fence-and-apple-pie life and went to smoke hashish and drink themselves stupid in the hot spicy city sandwiched between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

Burroughs and Bowles, Kerouac and Ginsberg, Leary and Eldridge Cleaver; at one time or another they all came to the Kasbah. Bowles wrote his paean to love and louche living, Under the Sheltering Sky, in Tangier, and Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch. These days that romantic world of languid foreigners, burdened by their own existential ennui, much given to gnomic utterances but always impeccably turned out in white, has been overtaken by more plebeian activities.