In 2019, urban abandonment became a burning issue in Morocco after the accidental deaths of several young people in clandestine mining operations. The deaths in Jerada, a shrinking town near the Algerian border, sparked the hirak (social movement). This article has three objectives. First, it introduces the issue of urban shrinkage in Morocco, a North African country where shrinkage was overlooked by public policies and research until 2019. We will show that the territorial decline in Morocco is a major phenomenon that currently affects a fifth of its cities. Second, we aim to demonstrate that while some factors of territorial decline in Morocco are similar to those identified in the North (demographic transition, urban spread and deindustrialisation), other factors are more country specific. We highlight three factors that are particularly linked to the Moroccan context: the climate's impact on the decline of agricultural regions; the role of geopolitical conflicts and their impact on the borders; and, lastly, the role of politics in a state, which was governed by an external regime during the colonial period and has since been under an authoritarian regime. In both cases, some peripheral regions were dependent on or even abandoned by the centre. Third, we propose preliminary channels of reflection on the different ways that urban decline has been silently managed in Morocco. The process of urban decline is likely to trigger major social action. In the meantime, the public authorities' failure to identify the issue clearly is problematic for the regions concerned.