Essaouira Travel Guide

You usually smell Essaouira before you see it. Somewhere on the road from the argan country inland, the air turns cooler and salty, the light grows paler, and a line of white walls appears against a grey-blue sea. Then you are at the gates: fishermen pushing handcarts of sardines, gulls wheeling over the harbour, a man in a hooded djellaba selling cigarettes one by one, and a long, honey-coloured rampart lined with old cannons pointing out to the islands.

Essaouira is small enough to walk across in fifteen minutes, yet many visitors who planned a single night end up staying a week. The town has a gift for slowing people down. Its medina is a grid of straight streets rather than a labyrinth, its traffic is mostly on foot, and its rhythm is set by the fishing boats, the call to prayer and the wind, which blows so reliably for much of the year that the town is sometimes called the windy city of Africa.

A town built on purpose

Most Moroccan medinas grew organically over many centuries. Essaouira was designed. In the 1760s Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah decided to build a new royal port on this stretch of coast, opposite a cluster of rocky islands that had been used by sailors since antiquity. He brought in engineers, including a French architect, to lay out a fortified town in a style that mixed European military planning with Moroccan traditions. He then invited merchants, many of them Jewish families, to settle and trade on behalf of the crown.

The result was a cosmopolitan seaport that for a century was one of the busiest in the country, the place where goods from the caravans of the Sahara met ships from Europe. That past still shows in the regular streets, the arcaded main avenues, the old consulate buildings, the sea bastions and the former Jewish quarter. In 2001 the medina was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List as an outstanding example of a fortified port town of the late eighteenth century.

Before it was Essaouira, the place was known to sailors as Mogador, and you will still see both names everywhere, on maps, on boats and on the airport sign. Many residents use them interchangeably.

The character of the town

Essaouira is a meeting point of many worlds. The countryside around it belongs to two communities: the Arabic-speaking Chiadma to the north and the Amazigh Haha people to the south, who speak Tashelhit. The town itself has been shaped by Muslim and Jewish merchants, by sailors and craftsmen from across the Atlantic coast, and by the Gnaoua, a spiritual brotherhood whose roots lie in sub-Saharan Africa and whose music has become the town’s signature sound.

Art is part of daily life here. Workshops under the ramparts turn the fragrant wood of the thuya tree into boxes, chess sets and inlaid tables. Self-taught painters exhibit bright, dreamlike canvases in small galleries along the lanes. Music spills out of doorways in the evening, and every year the town fills up for festivals of Gnaoua, Andalusian and classical music.

It is also a working town, not a museum. The harbour is one of the most important on this part of the coast, with a boatyard where wooden trawlers are still built by hand. Behind the medina walls, the modern town has schools, offices and housing estates, and most local families shop at the same markets you will wander through.

Who Essaouira suits best

• Travellers who want a gentle medina: safe, walkable and much calmer than Marrakech or Fes.
• Couples and slow travellers who enjoy long lunches, sea views and evenings on a rooftop.
• Wind and wave lovers: kitesurfers, windsurfers and surfers come for the reliable breeze and the beaches nearby.
• Music and art enthusiasts, especially around the festival seasons.
• Families looking for a car-free old town, a long sandy beach and easy day trips into the countryside.
• Anyone combining cities: Essaouira fits neatly between Marrakech and Agadir on a coast-and-mountains loop.

If you want hot, still beach days and calm swimming, Essaouira may surprise you. The wind and the cool Atlantic keep temperatures mild even in midsummer, and the beach is more for walking, kitesurfing and football than for lying in the sun. Bring a jacket, and you will find that the mild climate is part of the charm.

How to use this book

The chapters follow the order in which most people plan a trip. We begin with the town’s history, because so much of what you see makes more sense once you know why a sultan built a port here and who came to live in it. Then come the practical chapters on arriving, getting around and choosing where to stay, followed by the sights, the hidden corners, ready-made itineraries, food, customs and shopping. The final chapters cover day trips, practical information, useful phrases and a checklist to help you plan.

Throughout the book you will find three kinds of highlighted box. Local tip boxes share the small things our team has learned over many visits. Good to know boxes explain customs or practical details. Avoid this boxes point out common mistakes. We deliberately do not print exact prices, opening hours, phone numbers or the names of private businesses: they change too often, and an out-of-date detail is worse than none. Instead we tell you what to expect and what to check locally.

However long you stay, let Essaouira set the pace. Its pleasures are simple ones: the first coffee in the square while the gulls argue overhead, the smell of grilled sardines at the harbour, the sound of a guembri drifting over the rooftops, and the moment each evening when the sun drops into the sea behind the islands.