Africa & Middle East > Morocco > Atlantic Coast > Essaouira > Articles > Letter From Essaouira

Local fisherman Miloud Mouk summed it up best:

‘ Essaouira is a hospital for people who need to relax.’

I’d checked into this emergency ward after the haggling, hassling, and harassing of Marrakech. It was mid-afternoon. Walking through the white-washed Medina no-one demanded money, tried to sell me a carpet, a guided-tour, or their sister. It was busy, but with Moroccans buying food and spices.

I reached the port as the sun began to lower, crowds milling around stalls frying sardines direct from the boats. I milled too. Never had I enjoyed milling as much.

With sunset came the colours - dripping silver fish draped over a fisherman’s shoulder, ochre city walls bleeding crimson, the purple djellebahs of women embarking on early-evening strolls. While the sun kissed the Atlantic, fisherman Miloud explained the attraction of his hometown:

‘It’s not noisy here like Marrakech or Agadir. It’s small quiet, everything is cheap, there’s sea and a beach. What more is there?’

I was in no mood to argue. In fact I was in no mood to do more than sit and sip mint tea. As the evening progressed I began to worry that someone had lobotomised me in my sleep on the bus from Marrakech. To my relief, I began to meet other people at similar stages of deceleration. There was Eiji from Osaka:

‘I want to relax, and here I can relax. The people are very friendly.’

Lucio and Paula from Vicenza who loved the ‘light, the blues and the whites. And the fish - they’re very good, cheap and fresh.’ Lê Dung, a Vietnamese-French woman who found it ‘like a village where the shopkeepers are kind and the tourists are not like cows following each other around.’

Over the next few days my pace of life slowed to a stroll - heading to the port to watch the fishing boats go out, and again to watch them come in. Between times, the day was marked by the Muezzin’s call, and the shadows moving across Place Moulay Hassan. Soon my watch was a distant memory. Unsurprisingly, we were not alone in having been seduced by this beauty. The Phoenicians were the first in 700 BC, followed by the Romans, then the Portuguese who built the ramparts in 1506, and the British who set up cotton import houses here in the 19th century. Benjamin Disraeli’s father was born into Essaouira’s once extensive Jewish population.

More recently, Essaouira attracted 60s hippies, in particular Jimi Hendrix, who wrote ‘Castles in the Sand’ after the ruins at Diabat, a neighbouring village which he tried to buy before being deported for drugs offences, and Cat Stevens, who as Yusuf Islam still summers at Essaouira’s Hotel des Iles.

Today, hippies have been replaced by windsurfers who flock to enjoy Essaouira’s blustery conditions - the chergui wind being one reason why the town’s sandy beach will never appeal to the mass sun-tanning market. Two such latter-day pilgrims to ‘Windcity Afrika’ were Scott and Nick who’d driven from Plymouth in a VW van whose exhaust fell off somewhere around Madrid.

‘Got it fixed here for two quid,’ said Nick in admiration of Essaouira’s value-for-money.

‘There’s great waves, quite ferocious,’ said Scott in admiration of it’s breezy climate. I hadn’t the courage to tell them that to me, doing anything more than drinking mint tea seemed like far too much effort. Occasionally, however, I did muster energy to wander. There were the ramparts, resplendent with bronze cannon purloined from King Felipe of Spain, offering tasty views over the Islands of Mogador - where Romans once crushed shellfish to make purple ink for Imperial cloaks.

There were the souks, where, in contrast to other Moroccan towns, the only danger was being mown down by carts of coconut and prickly pears.

And then there was Orson Welles Square, a memorial to the corpulent director who filmed his Cannes-winning Othello here in 1949. The film’s backers pulled out early, but Welles continued to pay everyone - with sardines. His bust stands proudly just outside the walls.

During the heat of midday, I sheltered in the woodmaker’s workshops beneath the ramparts, where earnest young men craft thickly-scented thuya wood into beautiful furniture, boxes and jewellery. I popped into the Galerie Frédéric Damgaard to see Essaouira’s remarkable contribution to North African modern art, in particular Mohammed Tabal, whose chromatic paintings depict the trance-dances of his native Ganoua brotherhood. Frédéric, the Danish owner, waxed lyrical about his adopted home:

‘When the Phoenicians built here they consulted the constellations. So we began under a good star. They started something magical, and we still use that magic.’

Frédéric seems to have no problem selling Essaouira’s art. Two days previously, American Indie actress Parker Posey and Britfilm pin-up Stuart Townsend had bought three paintings in fifteen minutes. The film business has come a long way, I thought, since those sardines.

On my last evening I watched the sunset from the Skala ramparts at the port. The town walls melted into pink, families promenaded in the cooler air of dusk, and for a moment I seriously considered taking up a career in sardine fishing.

‘See you again,’ I said to the smartly-uniformed guard on the gate.

‘Inshallah,’ he replied. If God wills.

I hope he does.

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