Hammam al-Sabaghīn (Hammam of the Dyers)/ Sidi Bel Hasan

The Hammam of the Dyers is an Arab type bath with Hispano-Moresque features. It has a quadrangular plan; the layout of the square central hall is similar to that of the old baths in Palma de Mallorca. Despite the fact that major transformations have been carried out, it is still possible to recognise the typical arrangements the Muslim hammam borrowed from the Roman thermae.

The hammam opens via a chicane entrance. Such an entrance concealed bath users from prying eyes, and since it was fitted with seats, it is highly likely that it served as a rest hall. It is, however, difficult to recreate its original shape. The entrance opens onto the square main hall that has a gallery with twelve columns supporting a cupola. Sixteen wide flutes radiate out from the cupola, which rests on an octagonal drum. The columns, grouped in threes, support the arches of the drum and the squinches in the shape of half groin vaults which effect the transition from a square plan to an octagonal one. The hall, whose centre is occupied by a pool and a basin with a fountain that cool off the air, corresponds to the Roman apodyterium. This is where bathers undressed and where they rested after the bath. The steam room is a long lateral room covered with a barrel vault. It is divided into three areas by a colonnade at each end composed of two arches resting on a medial column. Under the tiling, to the east, is the heating. The building is completed by three other, smaller rooms, which were common in Islamic baths: they were most likely rest halls.

Similar baths have been pointed out in Palma de Mallorca, Grenada, Cordoba and Valence. The most enduring feature of these baths was the room under the cupola, supported by columns and surrounded by galleries. In Palma, only one room with a barrel vault ceiling remains, along with twelve columns that received the thrust of round horseshoe arches.

In the Bath of the Dyers the warm room is the centre of the composition by virtue of both its dimensions and its architecture. That prominence is recurrent in the baths of western Andalusia and Morocco, where the accent is put on the warm room, which may be marked by a central cupola or designed on the model of palatial Andalusian rooms divided into three parts with lateral columns.

The distinguishing features of the architecture of the Bath of the Dyers are the style of its stone capitals, the shape of the springers divided in accordance with the springing of the arches, the horseshoe form of the arches, and the ribbed cupola. All these elements relate the style of this hall to eleventh-century art. The half groin arch squinch, already encountered in the Palace of Manār in Qal‘at Bani Hammad, appeared in twelfth-century Moroccan monuments. The vaults became more pronounced, as in the Alhambra, not through roofs but through shapeless domes covered with mortar and plaster. The fluted cupola already appeared in the Maghreb in the Great Mosques of Kairouan and Tunis and was used again in the Almoravid era in the Great Mosque of Tlemcen and the Bath of the Dyers, which no doubt served as a model for Abd al-Wadid architects.