Essaouira is Morocco's Atlantic breather, the anti-Marrakech: where the Red City is heat, chaos and feverish haggling, Essaouira is sea breeze, white and blue light, seagulls and an unhurried pace that gets under your skin. This fortified port city, the old Mogador of the mapmakers, has an 18th-century medina laid out according to European architectural rules —straighter streets, open squares— that UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site, and ocean-facing ramparts that take your breath away at sunset.
Its fishing harbour, with blue boats piled together and seagulls squabbling over freshly landed fish, is one of the most photographed scenes in the country. Its huge, windy beaches have made it Morocco's windsurfing and kitesurfing capital, 'Africa's wind city'. And its musical soul beats to the rhythm of the Gnawa, descendants of sub-Saharan slaves whose hypnotic music fills the city every June at a festival that draws thousands of people. Hendrix, Orson Welles and Cat Stevens all fell under its spell.
This guide covers the essentials of Essaouira: the ramparts and the Skala with its bronze cannons, the harbour and its fish market, the medina and its thuya-wood marquetry workshops, the beaches and wind sports, and trips out to the argan cooperatives and Sidi Kaouki. As in any tourist city in Morocco, you should HAGGLE in the souk and the workshops and know how to say 'no, thank you' to FAKE GUIDES and pushy sellers, although the atmosphere here is noticeably more relaxed than in the interior. Essaouira is one of those places where you plan to stay one night and end up staying three.
Although there were Phoenician settlements and a Roman purple-dye works on the islands off the coast (the Purpuraires islands), and the Portuguese built a fortress here in the 16th century that they called Mogador, today's Essaouira was born in 1760, when the Alaouite sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah decided to create a modern royal port for trade with Europe and commissioned its design from a French architect, Théodore Cornut, a disciple of Vauban. Hence its regular layout and European-style ramparts. The city was named Es-Saouira ('the well designed' or 'the little rampart') and thrived as Morocco's main Atlantic port and a stop on the trade route for argan, sugar and goods from the interior; it had a large Jewish community that controlled much of the trade. It declined when trade shifted to Casablanca and Agadir in the 20th century, and was reborn from the sixties onwards as a haven for hippies, artists and musicians, and later as a destination for tourism and wind sports. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Red City founded by the Almoravids at the foot of the Atlas, capital of empires and today the tourist heart of Morocco, alongside the Atlantic ports of Essaouira, the old Mogador of Jewish merchants and traders, and Agadir, the former Portuguese stronghold reborn after the earthquake.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the white-and-blue city we know today existed, this stretch of the Atlantic coast already had a name on ancient maps: Mogador. Opposite the current harbour, on the small archipelago of the Purpurarian Islands, Phoenician sailors set up a trading stop around the 7th century BC. Centuries later, in the time of the Mauretanian king Juba II and the Roman Empire, a workshop here produced purple dye, the most expensive dye of Antiquity. It was made by macerating thousands of sea snails, the murex, and it was used to dye the cloth of emperors and senators. That industry gave the islands their name, 'Purpurarian', and archaeologists have found remains of the dye production there.
The name 'Mogador' stayed with the place for centuries. Some link it to a local saint, Sidi Mogdoul, whose marabout tomb still stands near the city, while others trace it to Phoenician roots. During the Middle Ages, the coast was an occasional anchorage with no permanent town. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Portuguese, set on conquering Morocco's Atlantic coast, built a small fort here that they called Mogador or Mogadouro. It was one more link in the chain of strongholds they used to try to control the coastline (Safi, El Jadida, Agadir). But the Portuguese presence was short-lived, and for much of the early modern period the site was left half-abandoned, little more than an anchorage battered by wind and waves.
Today's Essaouira didn't grow bit by bit: it was born from a plan. In 1760, the Alaouite sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah (Mohammed III) made a strategic decision that would change the fate of this corner of the coast. He wanted a great royal port, modern and well fortified, to channel maritime trade with Europe and compete with Agadir, whose trade he wanted to control. To design it, he didn't turn to local tradition but to a French architect and engineer, Théodore Cornut, trained in the school of the famous Vauban, Louis XIV's great military engineer.
The result is why Essaouira is so different from other Moroccan medinas. Cornut laid out a city along 18th-century European lines: streets straighter and wider than medieval ones, main axes, regular squares and a mighty European-style wall with bastions and cannon batteries, the 'skalas', to defend it from the sea. The city was named Es-Saouira, usually translated as 'the well drawn', 'the well laid out' or 'the little rampart', a name that reflects its planned origins.
The sultan wanted his new port to prosper, so he brought in merchants from all over the country and abroad. He granted special privileges to a community of Jewish merchants, the 'tujjar as-sultan' (the sultan's merchants), and entrusted them with much of the international trade. Essaouira thus became Morocco's Atlantic gateway: the place where sugar, argan oil, ostrich feathers, ivory and goods brought by caravans from the Sahara and Timbuktu went out, and where European products came in.
During the 19th century, Essaouira enjoyed its golden age as Morocco's main trading port and one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the country. Moroccans, Jews, Europeans and Africans crossed paths on its docks and in its warehouses, and foreign powers opened consulates there. Much of economic life revolved around the large Jewish community, which at times made up nearly half the city's population. Essaouira's Jews lived in the mellah (the Jewish quarter), had many synagogues and controlled a large share of international trade and finance, with correspondents in London, Marseille and Manchester. Jewish families from Essaouira carried enormous weight in the Moroccan economy of the time.
That mix of cultures left a deep mark on the city's open, tolerant character, which you can still feel today. Gnawa music, brought by the descendants of enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa, took root here with particular strength and became part of Essaouira's identity. Its hypnotic rhythms, a blend of trance, spirituality and African heritage, are now one of the city's great symbols.
Prosperity, however, began to fade in the late 19th century and above all in the 20th. Under the French protectorate (from 1912), the big Atlantic trade moved to the new, better-equipped ports of Casablanca and Agadir, and Essaouira lost its strategic role. The emigration of the Jewish community, which sped up after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and Morocco's independence in 1956, emptied the mellah and closed the synagogues. The once-bustling city slipped into a long decline and became a remote, sleepy fishing port.
Oddly enough, being forgotten kept Essaouira intact, and from the second half of the 20th century its charm began to draw a new kind of visitor. As early as 1949, filmmaker Orson Welles settled in the city to shoot much of his famous film 'Othello' (released in 1952 and awarded at Cannes), using the walls, the skalas and the alleyways as a natural set. Today Essaouira has a square named after him.
In the sixties and seventies, Essaouira became a legendary refuge of the counterculture and the hippie movement. Artists, musicians and travellers from all over the world came, drawn by its laid-back atmosphere, low prices and light. The most famous legend says that Jimi Hendrix passed through in 1969 and was inspired by the neighbouring village of Diabat. It's even said that he wrote 'Castles Made of Sand' while looking at the half-buried fortress of Borj el Berod, although the song actually predates his visit: a lovely myth the city has fondly adopted. Figures such as Cat Stevens also passed through, along with many visual artists who founded Essaouira's distinctive school of naïve painting.
That bohemian, artistic aura never left. Even during its commercial decline, Essaouira remained a city of painters, musicians and people looking for peace and quiet, very different from the bustle of the interior. This was the seed of its reinvention as a cultural and tourist destination at the end of the 20th century.
Full recognition came in 2001, when UNESCO declared the medina of Essaouira a World Heritage Site. It praised it as an outstanding example of an 18th-century fortified North African city built according to the principles of European military architecture of its time, and as evidence of an international port where cultures from Europe, Africa and Arabia lived side by side. The listing drove the restoration of the medina and the growth of a respectful kind of tourism based on riads, art and food.
At the same time, Essaouira established itself as one of the world's great windsurfing and kitesurfing destinations, thanks to the steady wind that has earned it the nickname 'the windy city of Africa'. And since 1998, every June it has hosted the Gnaoua and World Music Festival, one of the biggest music festivals in Africa. It fills the squares and walls with free concerts, draws hundreds of thousands of people and puts Gnawa musical heritage, also recognised by UNESCO, at the heart of the city's identity.
Morocco has also set out to recover the memory of its Jewish past. In recent years, synagogues have been restored, along with the Bayt Dakira house-museum ('the house of memory'), devoted to coexistence and to Essaouira's Jewish legacy, a gesture of reconciliation with the city's plural history. Today Essaouira is at once a working fishing port, a magnet for surfers and artists and a place of cultural pilgrimage. It's a small, windy city where its Phoenician, Portuguese, Jewish, African and hippie pasts blend into a unique atmosphere facing the Atlantic. That atmosphere is what led so many travellers, from Welles to the seventies backpackers, to decide to stay.
