What is melkia?

A melkia is a form of customary Moroccan title, drawn up by adouls, that records ownership of a property through a chain of witnessed acts. It is the older of the two title systems in Morocco today and coexists with the modern registered system.

Unlike a titre foncier, a melkia has no central registry, no cadastre number, and no surveyed plan attached at the moment of issuance. The document is a legal statement authenticated by two adouls, referencing the property by neighbour boundaries ("bounded to the north by the house of X, to the south by the derb of Y") and recording each successive transfer on the same document or in a connected chain.

Most of the Marrakech medina is held on melkia. Most of the medina changes hands, year after year, on melkia, without drama. The system works because it is embedded in a local context — families, adouls, and neighbours who together know whose house is whose.

What matters at the moment of purchase is not whether the property has "a title" in the abstract but whether the melkia is clean: one or a small number of named owners, a continuous chain of transfers, and no registered disputes. The adoul establishes this before the sale; a careful buyer asks the adoul to produce the chain and reads it with their agent.

A melkia can be converted to a titre foncier through the procedure of immatriculation. Many medina owners do not bother; the melkia system is sufficient for their purposes. Foreign buyers sometimes choose to immatriculate after purchase to simplify resale or financing, but this is optional, not required.