Anfa

In the 15th century Anfa slipped free of the Marinids altogether and became a haven for corsairs, and that brought the Portuguese down on it. In 1468 Afonso V sent an expedition that took the town and razed it; Estêvão da Gama had gone ahead disguised as a merchant, unremarked among the Portuguese traders its people were used to seeing. The ruins were granted to the Duke of Viseu but never resettled, though Portuguese ships still put in here for water. A new town grew up around them, which the Portuguese called Casa Branca, the "white house". Between 1756 and 1790, probably after Portugal gave up Mazagan in 1769, Sultan Sidi Muhammad ibn 'Abdallah built a port here to guard the coast against a Christian return, and rebuilt the town as ad-Dar al-Bayda, the same white house in Arabic.