Qualla: 1755 Meknes Earthquake

1755 Meknes Earthquake: Introduction

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

November 1755 was the cruelest month the western Mediterranean had ever known. On the first of the month, the great Lisbon earthquake flattened the Portuguese capital, sent tsunamis crashing across the Atlantic, and shook buildings as far away as Morocco. For years afterward, what happened twenty-six days later was dismissed as an aftershock -- a geological footnote to a better-known catastrophe. It was not. On November 27, a separate fault ruptured beneath the Rif mountains, and the cities of Fez and Meknes paid a price that Lisbon's shadow has long obscured.

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1755 Meknes Earthquake: Two Earthquakes, One Month

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The tectonic setting makes the double disaster comprehensible, if no less devastating. The boundary between the African and Eurasian plates runs through the Gibraltar Arc and the Alboran Sea, a zone where convergence creates a broad band of seismicity rather than a single clean f...

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1755 Meknes Earthquake: The Destruction of Two Cities

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Meknes, only a few homes remained standing, and those were badly damaged. The human toll was staggering and uneven. Of the city's 16,000 Jewish residents, only 8,000 survived. An additional 4,000 Muslims perished. The earthquake also destroyed the Christian church and the Fran...

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1755 Meknes Earthquake: The Fault Revealed

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For more than two centuries, the Meknes earthquake remained poorly understood -- misdated to November 18 in European sources, misidentified as an aftershock of the Lisbon event. A field survey in 2017 changed the picture dramatically. Geologists identified surface ruptures along ...

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1755 Meknes Earthquake: Echoes in the Landscape

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The scars of the 1755 earthquake are still legible across northern Morocco. At Volubilis, columns that had stood since the 2nd century finally toppled. The landslide at Moulay Idriss Zerhoun altered the terrain that pilgrims had walked for centuries to reach the mausoleum of the ...

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