Essaouira

The bay was used long before the present town. Phoenician and then Carthaginian sailors put in at the offshore islands, and around the turn of the first century AD Juba II of Mauretania set up workshops there that produced the purple dye giving the Purpuraires their name. Portuguese forces built the fort of Castelo Real of Mogador on the shore in 1506 and lost it to local resistance four years later, leaving the anchorage to local traders and to European ships that came for sugar and cloth.

The town seen today was made deliberately. In the 1760s Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah chose the site for a new royal port that would channel Atlantic trade away from Agadir and towards Marrakech, and employed European engineers, among them the Frenchman Théodore Cornut, to lay out fortifications and a regular street plan — hence the name Essaouira, usually explained as "the well designed". Merchants were invited to settle, including a large Jewish community whose leading families, the tujjar al-sultan, handled much of Morocco's foreign trade. Through the 19th century the port shipped almonds, gum, ostrich feathers and goods brought north by caravan, and from its rebuilding until the end of the 19th century it served as Morocco's principal port.

Trade shifted to Casablanca and Agadir in the 20th century and the town became a quiet fishing port; most of its Jewish population left after 1948 and in the decades that followed. Essaouira drew painters, hippies and musicians from the 1960s, and Orson Welles filmed much of his Othello in and around the ramparts. Since the 1990s restoration, the 2001 UNESCO listing of the medina and the growth of surfing and festivals have made tourism the town's main business again.

Essaouira is closely identified with Gnawa music, the trance repertoire of brotherhoods descended from West Africans brought north across the Sahara, played on the three-stringed guembri with iron qraqeb castanets at all-night lila ceremonies. Since 1998 the town's June festival has put that music on open-air stages beside jazz and other guests, and it draws crowds far larger than the population.

The town's other long tradition is craft. Workshops under the ramparts turn the burr and root of the thuya tree into inlaid boxes, tables and chessboards, a trade particular to this stretch of coast, and argan oil from the trees inland is pressed by women's cooperatives. Painting is unusually prominent for a town of this size: a self-taught school of Essaouira artists emerged in the second half of the 20th century, and small galleries are scattered through the medina.

Layers of history sit close together. The Mellah and its synagogues, the shrine of Sidi Mogdoul on the shore, and the mosques of the medina belong to a port that was Muslim, Jewish and, commercially, European at once, and the annual Andalusian music festival is built on that memory. Manners are Moroccan and largely unchanged by tourism: greetings before business, tea offered in shops, modest dress away from the beach, and a working rhythm set by the fishing fleet and the call to prayer.

Essaouira had about 78,000 people at the 2014 census, which makes it a small city by Moroccan standards and the centre of a province of farming and argan country. Fishing remains important — sardines and conger above all, landed at a harbour kept small by competition from Agadir and Safi — alongside tourism, craft workshops, argan oil and the trade that serves both.

Most residents live outside the walls, in the newer districts that spread inland and along the roads north and south; the medina holds a mix of long-standing families, guesthouses and shops, and rising property prices there have pushed some households out. Mornings begin at the harbour with the boats coming in and the auction; the middle of the day is quiet and shuttered; the squares and the seafront fill again in the late afternoon, when the wind is at its strongest and the beach fills with football games.

Seasonality shapes the year. Summer and festival weekends bring Moroccan holidaymakers from Marrakech and Casablanca as well as foreign visitors, and winter is slow. Water supply, the pressure of new building on the coast and the narrow economic base are the recurring local concerns, and young people frequently leave for Marrakech, Casablanca or abroad for work.

Fish dominates. Sardines are the everyday catch and are grilled whole over charcoal, stuffed with chermoula — a marinade of coriander, garlic, cumin, paprika and lemon — or fried in pairs; sea bream, sole, conger, squid, crab and prawns come off the same boats. The harbour stalls cook whatever is in front of them, and in the medina the same fish appears as a tagine baked with tomato, potato and preserved lemon.

Away from the sea the food is that of the Chiadma and Haha countryside. Argan oil is used as a condiment rather than for cooking, poured over bread or beaten with almonds and honey into the spread called amlou, which is a breakfast staple. Tagines of lamb with prunes or chicken with olives, couscous on Fridays, harira soup, and flatbreads — round khobz, layered msemen, the spongy pancake baghrir — are eaten here as elsewhere in Morocco.

The market halls inside the walls sell olives, spices, dates and honey, and street kitchens turn out bowls of snail broth, bean stews and grilled sandwiches. Mint tea is constant, poured from height into small glasses; freshly squeezed orange juice is cheap on the main square; and coffee is drunk strong, often with a glass of water alongside. Alcohol is served discreetly in licensed restaurants and hotels rather than in ordinary cafés.