Like the famous fourteenth-century traveler and scholar Ibn Battuta (d. 1368–9 or 1377), many individuals from North Africa and Muslim Spain and Portugal (al-Andalus) left their homes and traveled long distances in the medieval and early modern periods, often motivated by a range of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual profits. Yet journeys that began in the Islamic West did not always end in the cities of the Islamic East. Just as travel to the Islamic East from the Islamic West forged connections among the Muslims of the eastern and western Mediterranean, travel within the Islamic West created local networks and urban hubs made up of ideas and individuals of local as well as regional importance. This paper will focus on the city of Tlemcen as a lens through which to further our understanding of local sites of intellectual activity and religious pilgrimage in the Islamic West as well as the textual making of such sites. The first part of the paper will explore the development of Tlemcen as a site of intellectual activity and local pilgrimage, given that single sites often served both purposes, from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. The second part of the paper will examine the movement of people from Fez and Marrakesh to Tlemcen and seek to understand the place of these three cities as a part of a larger regional intellectual and pilgrimage network. The research for this paper will be undertaken through an examination of several textual works focused on the scholars and saints of the city such as Kitāb al-Bustān fī dhikr al-awliyā’ wa-al-ʿulamā’ bi-Tilimsān by Ibn Maryam (d. 1605), as well as works containing geographical descriptions of these cities. Such texts were central to making and maintaining the city as a hub for intellectual and spiritual activity, as much as the actual presence of scholars and saints therein. While it is recognized that the Islamic East was an important destination for many Muslims who traveled, this paper will ultimately demonstrate that centers of intellectual activity and pilgrimage developed in the Islamic West and fostered local networks of circulation and connectivity, often understudied in scholarly analyses of knowledge production and circulation in the Islamic world.