Essaouira

The wind has a name here. Locals call it the alizé — a trade wind that blows north from the Atlantic almost every afternoon between June and September, dropping the temperature by ten degrees and driving kite surfers from around the world to a beach that stretches eleven kilometres south of the old city walls. The wind is the reason Essaouira exists.

The Portuguese arrived in 1506 and built a trading post they called Mogador, from the Berber word amogdul — the walled place. The ramparts standing today are not Portuguese but French-Moroccan, built in 1765 by Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, who redesigned the city from scratch using a French engineer named Théodore Cornut. The result is unusual in Morocco: a grid. Straight streets, a logical harbour, cannons still pointed at the sea.

Orson Welles spent two years filming his adaptation of Othello here, beginning in 1949. He ran out of money three times. When the costumes failed to arrive from Italy, he filmed the murder scene in a Turkish bath — the actors in towels rather than period dress — and the sequence became the film's most celebrated. A statue of Welles stands near the ramparts, facing the ocean he kept returning to.

Jimi Hendrix visited in 1969 for approximately two days. The mythology around his visit — that he wrote "Castles Made of Sand" here, that he lived in a village outside the city — is largely confected. What is true is that Essaouira's Gnawa musicians have a documented connection to American blues that predates Hendrix's visit by a century. The shared root is the five-note pentatonic scale carried across the Atlantic in the bodies of enslaved people. The Gnawa maalems play the guembri, a three-stringed bass lute, at the same frequencies that John Lee Hooker called the boogie.

The medina is compact — you can walk its diameter in fifteen minutes — and almost entirely pedestrian. The streets are blue and white rather than ochre. The light off the Atlantic is different from Marrakech: softer, cooler, photographic. The fishing harbour is operational and smells accordingly. The morning auction begins at 8am.

The best months are April, May, October, and November. The summer wind, while famous, makes the beach uncomfortable for anything but water sports. March can be cold and wet. July and August bring the Gnawa Music Festival, the largest gathering of Gnawa masters in the world, five days of free outdoor concerts.

Essaouira is three hours from Marrakech by CTM bus or shared taxi. The road crosses the Jbilet hills and drops to the Atlantic coast through argan forest — the trees filled, in spring, with Moroccan goats that climb twelve feet off the ground to eat the fruit. The image is real. The goats are occasionally placed there for photographers, but the behaviour is genuine and predates the tourism industry by several centuries.