Agadir

Agadir lies on a wide Atlantic bay north of the mouth of the Oued Souss; above the port rises the 236-metre hill of the kasbah.¹ The port itself lies 35 kilometres south of Cap Ghir.² In 2024 the municipality of Agadir had 504,768 inhabitants, making it the largest municipality in the Souss-Massa region.³

The name comes from Tashelhit: an agadir, plural igudar, is a fortified communal granary in which each family has its own lockable chamber for its harvest.⁴ Many villages and small towns in southern Morocco bear this name.⁵

In 1505 a small Portuguese fishing settlement grew up by a spring below the hill; the Founti quarter is named after this spring.⁶ In 1541 the place passed to the Saadians.⁷ In 1572 Sultan Moulay Abdallah had the fortification on the hill enlarged into a kasbah, and until 1637 Agadir was the port of the Saadians, through which above all sugar from the Souss was shipped.⁸ In 1746 Dutch merchants set up a trading post at the foot of the kasbah.⁹

When Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah concentrated trade in Mogador, today's Essaouira, the port of Agadir was closed, in 1765 according to one source and in 1767 according to the other.¹⁰ From 1917 the bay again served as a harbour of refuge for the fishing fleet, and the large modern port was completed in 1953.¹¹

On 29 February 1960 at 11.41 pm an earthquake of magnitude 5.7 destroyed most of the city.¹² Around 80 per cent of the buildings collapsed, and the number of dead is estimated at 15,000 to 18,000.¹³ More than 90 per cent of the kasbah was destroyed; only its southern wall remained standing.¹⁴

On 3 March 1960 King Mohammed V announced that Agadir would be rebuilt. After an emergency phase in 1960–1961 a newly planned city arose, and its reconstruction was completed in 1966.¹⁵

The Kasbah Agadir Oufella is protected as a historic monument by dahirs of 1932 and 1944 and is being restored as part of the 2020–2024 urban development programme.¹⁶ A cable car, the first in Morocco, climbs 1,700 metres from the city up to the kasbah in six minutes.¹⁷

The port combines a fishing port, a commercial port and a marina, and is the outlet for the agricultural and food-industry products of the Souss-Massa plain.¹⁸ Souk El Had, the city's great market, covers more than 13 hectares with around 3,000 shops behind a six-metre wall with 13 gates.¹⁹

In the hinterland lies the Arganeraie, a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1998, covering almost 2.5 million hectares between the High Atlas, the Anti-Atlas and the Atlantic.²⁰ The knowledge of the argan tree and of extracting its oil, passed on mainly by women, has been on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2014.²¹ Since 2021, 10 May has been the International Day of Argania.²²

Agadir-Al Massira airport is the third-largest in Morocco by traffic: from January to November 2024 it handled more than 2.8 million passengers, and its capacity is to grow from 2.6 to 7 million a year.²³ The port is connected to the interior by the motorway from Marrakesh to Agadir.²⁴