Why I keep going back to Essaouira
There is a specific kind of travel love that is hard to explain
It is not the first-visit love, which is loud and obvious and has everything to do with novelty. It is not nostalgia, exactly, though it uses nostalgia’s materials. It is more like a city has got into your system — into the specific way your body responds to salt air and particular light — and you find yourself, at irregular intervals, needing to go back.
Essaouira has done this to me four times now. I went first because I wanted a break from Marrakech on a longer Morocco trip. I went back because I missed something I could not name. The third time I planned it as the whole trip. The fourth time, last spring, I booked the bus from Marrakech before I had booked my flight home, which is maybe the clearest evidence of the condition.
I am going to try to explain why. I am not sure I can do it justice.
The wind is not a problem. The wind is the point.
Everyone mentions the wind as if it is a complication. Essaouira’s Alizé — the Atlantic trade wind that blows primarily from the north-northwest — hits the city in the afternoon most days from April through October, sometimes earlier, always reliably. In July, at 3 pm on the beach, you are dealing with 25–30 knots of sustained wind that blows the top layer of sand in horizontal ribbons and makes umbrella deployment impossible.
The first time I arrived in Essaouira in July, I walked to the beach at noon, found a perfect stretch of empty Atlantic sand, set up my towel, and lasted 40 minutes before the wind drove me back to the medina. I thought I had made a mistake.
What I understand now, after four visits, is that the wind is what makes the afternoon Essaouira experience real. The medina in the afternoon, when most coastal Atlantic towns fill up with sunbathers, is instead full of people because the beach is not a viable option. This creates a particular afternoon atmosphere: cool café terraces, the smell of the ocean without the sun’s intensity, a city that actually functions normally in its tourist season rather than shutting down until sunset.
And the beach in the morning — before the wind builds — is extraordinary. Wide, flat, Atlantic-grey, with the ramparts of the medina visible to the north and the long headland of the Cap Sim to the south. If you walk far enough south, the tourist infrastructure disappears entirely and the only company is the occasional horseman and the kelp line at the tide’s edge.
The seafood stalls at the port and an argument about sardines
My favourite meal in Morocco, after four trips and a serious amount of eating, costs about MAD 40 (less than €4) and is eaten standing up at a plastic table on the harbour quay.
The port of Essaouira is an active fishing port — painted blue wooden boats, men sorting nets, the smell of the sea and diesel and fish in about equal proportions. At the quayside, a row of grills set up each morning with whatever the boats brought back: sardines (year-round), red mullet (seasonal), mackerel, dorade, octopus, sole, sometimes small tuna. You pick your fish, they grill it on charcoal, and it arrives on a plate with bread and a cup of chermoula sauce within about four minutes of ordering.
I have been told, by people who should know better, that the sardines at the Essaouira port are “the best in Morocco.” I have been told, by a fishmonger in Tangier, that Tangier sardines are superior because they come from the Strait waters rather than the open Atlantic. I cannot resolve this dispute and have stopped trying. What I can say is that the Essaouira sardines — grilled over charcoal until the skin chars, eaten with your hands with bread torn from a disc that is warm from the oven — are one of those fundamentally satisfying things that make it clear why Moroccan food has the reputation it does.
The second evening on my third Essaouira trip, I ate at the port with a French couple I had met at my guesthouse. We ordered three times and stayed for two hours. The fisherman who owned the grill came out at one point to argue, in French, about the proper use of ras el hanout in chermoula. He was wrong (chermoula should not contain ras el hanout — it is a lemon-cumin-paprika herb sauce, not a warm-spice sauce), but he argued with such conviction that I began to doubt myself.
The Blue City comparison, and why Essaouira wins for me personally
I always feel slightly guilty putting this in writing, but: I find Chefchaouen beautiful in an exhausting way. The blueness is real and it is extraordinary and it photographs magnificently and I understand completely why it has become one of the most photographed cities in Africa. And it is also, in July, absolutely packed with tourists doing exactly what you are doing — looking at the blue walls, photographing the blue walls, trying to get a photograph of the blue walls without other tourists in the frame.
Essaouira has not been Instagrammed in the same way. It has a reputation and a tourist presence — it is not undiscovered — but the medina’s scale (smaller, more compact than Chefchaouen in some ways) and the wind and the working port create a city that does not feel like it has been arranged for photographs. The blue-and-white is there — Essaouira is also predominantly white-walled with blue details, the Portuguese ramparts the bleached stone of old Atlantic fortresses — but the city’s primary relationship is with the sea, not with the lens.
I also think Essaouira is genuinely quieter. The medina has one main street (the Rue Mohammed El Qory, sometimes called Rue de la Skala) and a handful of parallel lanes; you can compass-orient yourself within an hour. The vendors are present but not aggressive in the way of Marrakech’s medina or even Fes. I have walked through the Essaouira medina alone in the evening and felt the particular pleasure of being in a foreign place without performing vigilance.
The Gnawa music and the Berber hippie era
Essaouira has a specific musical identity that is not replicated anywhere else in Morocco at the same intensity. The Gnawa tradition — a trance music tradition rooted in the sub-Saharan African communities brought to Morocco over centuries of trade and enslavement — has its strongest living expression in Essaouira and, to a lesser degree, in Marrakech’s Djemaa el-Fna.
The annual Gnaoua World Music Festival, typically held in June, brings 400,000–500,000 people to a city of 80,000 for four days of outdoor concerts. If you plan to be in Essaouira during the festival, book accommodation six months ahead; the city becomes temporarily a different place. The outdoor stages on the beach and in the Place Moulay Hassan fill with a mixture of Moroccan and international crowd that has no parallel in the Moroccan tourist calendar.
Outside the festival, Gnawa musicians play in the square and in informal sessions in some of the medina cafés. The music itself — pentatonic, hypnotic, built on a bass lute called the guembri, punctuated by metal castanet-like krakeb — is the kind of thing that gets inside your head in the best way. I once stayed in Essaouira for five days partly to attend a late-evening session I had heard about from another guest, which turned out to be four musicians playing in a small room above a carpet shop for about twelve people, lasting until 2 am, and being one of the more unusual and memorable music experiences I have had anywhere.
The Berber hippie era of the late 1960s and early 1970s left a different kind of residue. Jimi Hendrix is the most famous name in the local mythology — he allegedly stayed in a small house in Diabat, the village south of Essaouira, after hearing Gnawa music in Marrakech and following it west. Whether the precise story is accurate is disputed, but his visit is documented, and the bohemian-traveller reputation that accreted around Essaouira in that period produced a distinctive artistic culture that is still visible in the gallery density of the medina (more per square metre than anywhere else in Morocco outside Casablanca) and in the mix of Moroccan and international artists who have based themselves here.
The thuya wood workshops are part of this. Thuya is a burl wood from the Atlas cedar, found in Morocco’s south-west, with an extraordinary grain pattern — swirling, dark-gold, almost luminescent when polished. Essaouira’s woodworking cooperatives produce boxes, frames, trays, and decorative objects from it that are significantly better value than equivalent goods in Marrakech’s tourist souks. I have bought one thing in each of my four Essaouira visits and have never regretted any of them, which is not a claim I can make about my Marrakech souk purchases.
The quieter version of Morocco
This is the deepest reason I keep going back, and it is the most personal.
Marrakech, which I love and have written about and will keep visiting, requires a particular kind of engagement that is fundamentally about managing intensity. You manage the medina navigation, the tout interactions, the sensory volume of the Djemaa el-Fna, the heat, the density. This engagement is rewarding — it produces something real and good when you get it right — but it is also tiring. After three days in Marrakech I am usually full.
Essaouira asks less of you. The medina is navigable. The vendors are present but not urgent. The wind keeps the temperature tolerable. The pace — and this is not nothing — is genuinely slower than Marrakech, not performatively slower, actually slower, in the sense that things open late, close early for no discernible reason, and the man at the café on Place Moulay Hassan will refill your tea and not bring the bill until you stand up.
I go back to Essaouira, I think, because it is where Morocco is easiest to inhabit rather than visit. The distinction matters more as I have travelled in Morocco more. Early in my Morocco life, visiting was sufficient. Now I want to be in a place for a few days in a way that does not feel like a performance of being in a place.
For the first-time Morocco visitor, I still maintain — as I argued in the why Essaouira over Marrakech post — that Essaouira is an underrated starting point. The Essaouira destination guide has full practical details.
If you are coming from Marrakech, the CTM bus takes about 3 hours and runs several times daily. Worth booking at least a day ahead in summer. If you want to do something while you are there beyond medina wandering and port eating, a surf lesson on the Essaouira beach is one of the most consistently good introductions to the beach — the wind that makes it excellent for kite-surfing and windsurfing also creates consistent small waves that work well for beginners, and the surf schools are clustered south of the medina within walking distance.
What I will do on the fifth visit
I already know. I will take the CTM from Marrakech. I will check into the same riad I used on my third visit — a place run by a couple from Essaouira who fill the courtyard with potted geraniums and serve the best msemen in the medina for breakfast. I will go to the port that evening and eat sardines. I will walk south along the beach the following morning before the wind builds. I will find a café on the square and read for two hours in the afternoon while the wind moves through the wooden lattice screens of the terrace.
And at some point, in the particular afternoon light that comes through the rampart arches and falls across the square in horizontal bars, I will understand again, briefly and clearly, why I keep coming back to this specific place.
I cannot tell you more precisely than that. Some cities get into you. Essaouira got into me.