Essaouira Medina

Essaouira's medina is the only one in Morocco designed by a European architect. Sultan Mohammed III hired Théodore Cornut, a French engineer captured by Barbary corsairs, to lay out the city in the 1760s on a grid plan — straight streets, right angles, regular blocks. After Fes and Marrakech, where the medina is a labyrinth, Essaouira feels almost navigable.

The grid is not perfect. The souks in the centre tangle into narrower passages, and the residential quarters north of the main street have the organic logic of any old city. But the principle holds: you can walk in a straight line from Bab Doukkala to the port and never get lost.

The medina is also small. Twenty minutes end to end. This is part of Essaouira's appeal — the compression means everything is close, the scale is human, and the intensity of Marrakech or Fes is absent. The trade-off is depth. There is one main commercial street, one main square, and perhaps a dozen side streets worth exploring. The riads are modest — smaller rooms, lower ceilings, less ornamentation than their Marrakech equivalents. The charm is in the Atlantic light that floods the white streets and the sound of seagulls over the muezzin.

UNESCO inscribed the medina in 2001, not for any single monument but for the urban plan as a whole — one of the finest examples of an 18th-century fortified port city.