Seville to Tangiers day tour

Rome2Rio lists Seville to Tangier as 3hr46min by train, bus & ferry. This is way outside my time frame for a day trip.

Are you sure you want to do that? What your are proposing is 3 to 5 hours each direction, plus passport control / customs both directions.

With all due respect, yours is a Really Bad Idea.

First, as pointed out upthread, that's a long, miserable slog of a day for just a couple hours at your destination. Not worth it.

Second: your plan guarantees that you see the absolute worst possible slice of Morocco.

If you were in Los Angeles (California), and you wanted to go to Mexico, would you arrange for a package tour to take you to Tijuana for a couple of hours? That's pretty much the experience you would have with your plan.

Morocco is great. Trying to visit it as a day trip is a bad way to do it. All you would see - at best - is a fake, grotesque, made-for-tourists, "bordertown" experience. Just like going to Tijuana.

Give Morocco at least a few days (flights there to/from Spain are dirt-cheap), or if you can't spare more than a day, then skip it for this trip, spend that time better in Sevilla or elsewhere, and come back when you can get past the ferry ports and fly to the real Morocco, in Marrakech or Fes.

plus passport control / customs both directions.

This is done on the Ferry outbound from Spain however if you don't get in the queue early then there is the risk of standing in line for the duration of the crossing. The return checks are done prior to boarding the ferry but it is very quick and efficient/couldn't care less.

As has already been said, Tangier is not a good choice to experience Morocco and the comparison to Tijuana is very apt. I certainly wouldn't advocate a day trip there not least one starting in Seville but if you're one of the many who only want to go so that you can say you've been to Africa then there's not much that can be said to dissuade you.

The NYTimes "52 Places" writer, Jada Yuan, The Trickiness of Being a Woman in Tangier.

Two friends, Linda and Melanie, had come to join me in Tangier. They represented strength in numbers. We were all eager to explore the city, and none of us wanted to do it as a woman traveling alone.
Female tourists, locals assured us, are fine without headscarves and with their knees showing (I was the only one in our group who did the latter), but you will get stares. We decided against tea at the famed Café Tingis in the medina because there was not a woman among the 50 or so crowded inside and out. Every time we took a walk, we’d get catcalled. Mostly that meant a lot of “holas,” but we were also followed for blocks, and Melanie said that multiple men hissed in her face.