Essaouira

Where it sits. Essaouira occupies a low rocky shelf on Morocco's Atlantic coast, roughly 175 km west of Marrakesh and 170 km north of Agadir, at a point where the bay is partly screened by the Île de Mogador and its reef. That shelter is the entire reason a port exists here: the open Atlantic swell breaks offshore, while the cold Canaries Current and a strong coastal upwelling feed a fishery that still lands sardines and conger eel in quantity. The same geography brings the trade winds. From spring into late summer a north-easterly blows almost daily across the bay, which keeps July afternoons near 22 °C while Marrakesh bakes at 40 °C, and which has made this the wind-sport capital of the Moroccan coast rather than a swimming resort.

The story behind it. The islands offshore carried Punic-era workshops producing purple dye from murex shells, and the Portuguese built a fort called Mogador here in the sixteenth century, but the town you walk through was commissioned from scratch. From 1760 the Alawid sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah set several architects to work on a new royal port, among them the French engineer Théodore Cornut and the Moroccan builder Ahmed al-Inglizi, with labour supplied in part by French captives taken after the failed expedition to Larache. Cornut laid out the kasbah quarter on a straight-line grid inside bastioned ramparts — a plan closer to a European garrison town than to any other Moroccan medina. The sultan then funnelled Atlantic trade through it, and a merchant class of Jewish traders licensed by the palace ran much of that commerce from the Mellah. UNESCO inscribed the medina in 2001.

On screen. Orson Welles based himself here in the early 1950s, staying at the Hôtel des Îles just south of the walls, while assembling his Othello (1952) across Morocco, Venice, Tuscany and Rome over roughly three years of stop-start financing. The production's most repeated anecdote belongs to this coast: with the costumes impounded, Welles restaged the murder of Roderigo in a steam bath so the cast could play the scene in towels — improvisation forced by a budget crisis, and now the film's best-known sequence. Sixty years later HBO shot Astapor for the third season of Game of Thrones at the Skala du Port, the fortified harbour bastion, using its gun galleries and square keep as the slaver city where Daenerys buys the Unsullied and turns them on their masters. The pyramids were added digitally; the crenellated sea wall is real, unaltered and free to walk. A small square inside the walls carries Welles's name.

What you actually see today. The Skala de la Ville runs about 200 metres along the northern sea wall, a broad artillery platform lined with eighteenth-century bronze cannon of Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese manufacture, waves detonating against the rocks below. In the vaults beneath it, workshops cut and inlay thuya — the burled root of the Tetraclinis tree that grows in the hills inland — a craft particular to this town. Bab el Marsa, dated 1769, opens onto the working harbour, where blue-painted wooden sardine boats are hauled out for repair and grill stalls sell the morning catch between the port and Place Moulay Hassan. Inside the walls the grid makes navigation unusually easy: one long spine, a crossroads at Souk Jdid, and the Mellah at the northern end, where the Bayt Dakira heritage house opened in 2020 around a restored synagogue.

Wind, music and the beach. The town beach curves south-east for about three kilometres to the mouth of the Oued Ksob and the ruined sea-bastion of Bordj el Berod, half-swallowed by sand — a ruin persistently and wrongly described as the castle from Jimi Hendrix's Castles Made of Sand, a song released two years before he ever set foot in Morocco. Beginners learn to windsurf off the town beach; wave sailors drive 25 km north to Moulay Bouzerktoun. Every June the Gnaoua and World Music Festival fills the ramparts and squares with hundreds of thousands of people for four days of Gnawa trance music and its collisions with jazz.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Marrakesh take about three hours; Essaouira-Mogador airport is 15 km south with seasonal European flights. April to June and September to November give the steadiest conditions, with the wind manageable and the medina uncrowded. July and August bring both the strongest wind and Moroccan holidaymakers, so accommodation prices climb and the beach fills. Winter is mild at 18 to 20 °C with the clearest light of the year on the ramparts. The medina is flat but paved in worn stone, and reaching the Skala means stairs.