Saïdia

Saïdia owes its existence to the frontier. The village grew around a kasbah built in 1883 for Sultan Hassan I at the point where the Oued Kiss, the boundary with French Algeria, reaches the Mediterranean, in a period when Morocco was trying to mark and hold its eastern limit. The kasbah, a square enclosure with corner towers near the eastern end of the beach, remains the oldest structure in town.

Under the French protectorate the setting made it a summer resort rather than a garrison. It became popular first with French settlers and then with families from Oujda, Berkane and the Algerian border towns, who came to camp and swim on the sand, and small hotels, cafés and holiday villas appeared behind the beach in the town that came to be known as the Blue Pearl. The closure of the land border with Algeria in 1994 ended the cross-border holiday traffic that had been part of that trade, and for a time the resort relied on Moroccan visitors and on emigrant families returning each summer from Europe.

The largest change came in the 2000s, when Saïdia was chosen for one of the national tourism plan's coastal resort schemes. A marina, golf courses, apartment blocks and hotels were built on the dunes west of the old village on a scale far beyond the existing town, with mixed results: parts filled slowly, ownership and management changed, and the development sits alongside rather than within the older resort. The estuary of the Moulouya to the west was protected, limiting building at that end of the strand.

Saïdia's culture is seasonal. For most of the year it is a small eastern Moroccan town, conservative and quiet, where Arabic in the region's eastern dialect is spoken alongside Tamazight from the surrounding countryside and Tarifit from Riffian families, and where the mosque, the café and the market set the pace. From June the population multiplies, and the town takes on the character of its visitors.

Those visitors are overwhelmingly Moroccan. Families come from Oujda, Berkane, Nador, Fès and Casablanca, and the diaspora arrives from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, driving down through Europe or crossing on the ferries, so Dutch and Spanish are as common as French on the promenade in August. Summer is the season for weddings, family reunions and long evenings, and the beach fills late in the day when the heat has gone out of the sun.

Music heard here is the music of the Oriental: rai from the Oran region across the border, reggada from the plains and the Beni-Snassen with its shoulder dance and shouldered rifles, and the Andalusian repertoire performed at formal occasions. Manners follow the rest of Morocco — greetings before business, hospitality offered readily, modest dress away from the sand — and visitors who observe that are treated with easy friendliness.

Only a few thousand people live in Saïdia through the winter, and the number rises many times over in July and August. The year-round economy is tourism, fishing along the coast and farming in the irrigated plain behind the town, where citrus, vegetables and olives grow on land watered from the Moulouya. Many households depend on the summer for most of their income, running apartments, cafés, beach concessions and shops for three months and closing for much of the rest.

Remittances and diaspora property matter as much as visitors. A large share of the holiday apartments belong to families living in Europe, standing empty outside the school holidays, and building has continued along the strip between the village and the marina. The resort development brought construction work and hotel jobs, though many of them are seasonal as well.

Out of season the rhythm is slow: fishing boats, school runs, the daily market, and cafés along the front where men sit over tea with the shutters of the summer businesses down behind them. Water is the underlying worry, as it is throughout eastern Morocco, with the Moulouya's flow reduced by drought and by the dams upstream that irrigate the plain, and with the estuary's wetlands sensitive to any further loss.

Fish dominates. Sardines, anchovies, sea bream, sea bass, red mullet and prawns come off boats along this coast and at Ras El Ma to the west, and are grilled over charcoal or fried simply, usually with chermoula, a marinade of coriander, garlic, cumin, paprika and lemon. Fish tagines cooked with tomato, peppers and preserved lemon are the sit-down version, and platters of mixed fried fish are the standard seaside meal.

The inland cooking of the Oriental appears alongside it. Karan, the baked chickpea-flour and egg slice associated with Oujda, is sold from carts in summer; harira soup, berkoukes made with large couscous grains, and tagines of lamb from the high plateaux are eaten at home; and mechoui, whole roast lamb, marks weddings and feasts, of which there are many in August.

Berkane's clementines and oranges are pressed into juice at every café, and the plain also supplies olives, olive oil, melons and tomatoes. Summer street food runs to grilled corn, msemen pancakes, doughnuts and ice cream along the promenade, and pastry shops sell honeyed briouats and almond sweets. Mint tea is drunk all day, and alcohol is confined to licensed hotels and restaurants in the resort district.