Originally published October 2024 · Republished with permission of Mark Koch, Executive Director, Ride Nature

Skateboarding in Morocco: The Fez Story

Skateboarding in Morocco is growing quietly, steadily, and on its own terms. Morocco is not the first country you think of when African skateboarding comes to mind — Ghana has its Freedom Skatepark, Nigeria has Wafflesncream, Uganda has the Kitintale bowl that Jackson Mubiru built from nothing two decades ago. But in the ancient city of Fez, a freshly built mini ramp now sits on a youth compound, and it tells a story about how the sport takes root across this continent one city at a time.

Fez is one of the oldest cities on the African continent. Its medina dates back to the ninth century, and UNESCO recognised it as a World Heritage Site decades ago. Yet despite that deep history, or perhaps because of it, the city has always found ways to absorb new energy. Today, on a compound in that same ancient city, young people are learning to drop in on a freshly built mini ramp for the very first time.

Picture by Rafa Alvarez

Building It and Walking Away

A visiting team built the ramp in partnership with Yasin and Abi, two local youth leaders who have been using skateboarding as a community tool in Fez for over six years. The team arrived with four days on the ground. They finished the ramp in three. However, the build was far from straightforward — quality wood and steel, materials that any skatepark builder elsewhere takes for granted, proved genuinely difficult to source in Fez. So instead of following the original plan, the team improvised, adapted, and pushed through the material constraints until the ramp was standing.

Then, the following morning, they had to leave.

They drove away before a single session took place on the ramp they had just spent three days building. That gap — between building something and seeing it used — sits at the heart of almost every grassroots skate development story across Africa. The people who pour concrete in Mongu, Zambia, or weld rails in Addis Ababa often move on long before the community forms around what they built. The work and the reward separate across time and distance. That is simply the nature of this kind of work.

Furthermore, what remains in Fez matters far more than the team’s presence ever could. A ramp stands on the compound. Yasin and Abi continue leading the youth programme they have built over six years. And the young people of Fez now own the culture entirely — the sessions, the friendships, the progression, the community — all of it belongs to them.

What Morocco Is Building

Meanwhile, Morocco’s broader skate scene keeps pushing forward in ways that deserve far more attention than they currently receive. Skateboarding in Morocco has reached an inflection point. In Taroudant, Tifrkhin Skate empowers women and girls through skateboarding in a context where that work carries genuine cultural weight. In Rabat, Aya Asaqas came within reach of qualifying for the Paris 2024 Olympics and continues inspiring a generation of young Moroccan women to pick up a board. On the Atlantic coast, the Taghazout Skatepark has become a creative hub drawing skaters from across the continent and beyond. And now, in Fez, there is a mini ramp on a youth compound in a ninth-century city.

Moreover, none of these things happened by accident. Each one reflects years of quiet, consistent, largely unrecognised effort by local people who believed the culture was worth building before anyone else showed up to document it. The visiting team in Fez planted a seed. But Yasin, Abi, and the youth they work with were already the soil.

Africa Skateboarding Diary has been documenting the North Africa skate scene since 2015. Because the continent’s story does not belong to any one city, country, or scene — it belongs to all 54.

Know a skate scene, builder, or community project in Morocco or anywhere across Africa’s 54 countries? Submit your story at africaskateboardingdiary.com/submissions.

This story was originally published in October 2024 by Pursuit Collective — pursuitcollective.com/stories/through-the-lens-morocco. It has been republished on Africa Skateboarding Diary with the kind permission of Mark Koch, Executive Director of Ride Nature. All original photography courtesy of Ride Nature and Pursuit Collective.