01 December 07

Features

Here & Gnaoua

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Two hours’ drive west from Marrakesh there’s a point where the buildings stop being pink – as they are required to be in Morocco’s supremely style-conscious southern city, due to an enlightened bit of colonial-era legislation – and start being blue and white.

It’s the point where the city limits of Essaouira begin. Pink versus blue, feminine versus masculine. What a neat little conceit. It partly holds up, too. While Marrakesh is all souks, spices and exquisitely designed riads (for shopping, cooking and homemaking), Essaouira’s being is centred on its working harbour, from which the boats set out each dawn to trawl the black waters of the Atlantic. The harsh screeching of wheeling seagulls provides the soundtrack, at its most intense in late morning, as the sardine fishermen haul box-loads of silvery fish to the covered market beside the dock gate.

From the harbour runs a thick and muscular sea wall, its base planted on a jagged rock bed that’s pummelled by waves even on the calmest of days. Compare that with the city walls of Marrakesh, built of mud and flimsy stage-like scenery – they’ve never had to withstand any pounding and probably never would.

In common with port cities the world over, there’s an edge to Essaouira. It’s pretty like a Greek village, with whitewashed walls and windows picked out in cobalt, baked under a North African sky. The beach stretches for miles, surfing is big, winter sun is plentiful and the food is healthy and cheap. But in the narrowness of the old city alleys, the shadows are inky and temperatures suddenly plummet out of the sun. You can be freezing and boiling almost simultaneously.

Maybe it was this chiaroscuro quality that in June 1948 appealed to Orson Welles, who came to Essaouira to make his Othello. It was a fraught venture. The finance fell through, stranding the director and his crew of 60 with no cash and no costumes, which is why the attempted murder of Cassio was staged in a local bathhouse, so that only towels were needed. The shoot, which on-and-off took four years to complete and kept a lot of Essaouiris in sardines, is commemorated by Place Orson Welles, a small park between the city walls and harbour with an unrecognisable bust of the director at its centre, not improved by having lost its nose.

Other visitors have fared better. Jimi Hendrix took his only ever holiday here. Local lore has it that his song Castles Made of Sand was inspired by the ruined fortress that still stands two miles up the beach, which seems a plausible story except the track appeared on a 1967 album and Jimi didn’t hit town until 1969. Nevertheless, Essaouira was big with hippies, and it’s a legacy still felt today. There can’t be a town outside Jamaica that boasts more posters of Bob Marley, One Love could almost be the municipal anthem and the smell of weed hangs on street corners like cheap perfume lingers in a lift.

All of which is soon to change. Walk along Essaouira’s endless promenade, watching the beach footballers, and you’ll notice the grit that accumulates in your folds and creases is not sand but construction dust. Just beyond the landmark Hotel des Iles – where Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, supposedly still checks in each summer – huge swathes of land are being developed as upscale resort hotels, holiday residences and a Gary Player golf course.

Essaouira is swapping the hippie for the hip. My seafront hotel, the Ocean Vagabond, is a cool, modernist villa with art deco lines, flat-screen TVs in the breakfast room and acid jazz on the house sound system – we check in to Freak Power’s Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out. The same management run a beachfront café and “surf station”. With frequent high winds between March and September, surfing is big here and the town now actively markets itself as “Wind City Afrika”. The best-selling T-shirt in the souks is a silhouetted dude in a hooded Moroccan caftan, with a board tucked under his arm.