A stormed village by the Merenids in 1276
There is a ruined Kasbah at the centre of the village, as well as a mosque, a Koranic school and an old water tank which produces a regular crop of edible frogs. Past the village (a kilometre north on the main road) the old city walls of Tin-Mal lead up from the riverbank to the heights above. Tin-Mal was both the first and the last bastion of the Almohads. It was finally stormed in 1276 by the Merenids who, though they respected the great mosque, left no house standing, no tomb undefiled, and no citizen of Tin-Mal alive. However, the historian Ibn Khaldoun, who visited Tin-Mal a generation later, found Koranic reciters had returned to the mosque. When they entered the valley in 1924 French administrators found the area around the mosque covered in old shrines of which there is now no trace.