Essaouira

Essaouira belongs to the province of the same name in the Marrakesh-Safi region.¹ In 2024 the municipality had 82,962 inhabitants and the province 426,719.²

The city is a late foundation: the Alaouite sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah (1757–1790) wanted to create a royal port here and the country's leading trading centre.³ The plan was drawn up by a French architect influenced by Vauban's fortifications at Saint-Malo⁴; according to the French Wikipedia this was Théodore Cornut, whom the sultan summoned around 1764 and whose town plan of 1767 is now held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.⁵

The former name Mogador is traced back to the Phoenician word migdol, small fortress.⁶ The wall follows Vauban's model, and the city is built of a local stone, manjour.⁷ In 2001 the World Heritage Committee inscribed the medina under criteria ii and iv; the protected area covers 56.7 hectares.⁸

So that the trade of the south would converge on Essaouira, the port of Agadir was closed in 1765 or 1767; the sources give both years.⁹ The harbour gate, Bab el-Marsa, was built between 1769 and 1770 by Ahmed El Inglizi, an Englishman who had converted to Islam.¹⁰ As the port of Timbuktu, the city linked Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa with Europe in the late 18th and the 19th century.¹¹

From the outset Amazigh, Arabs, Africans and Europeans lived here side by side, Muslims, Christians and Jews.¹² In 1807 Sultan Moulay Slimane had a separate Jewish quarter, the mellah, laid out because the kasbah had become too cramped.¹³ The city's crafts include work in thuja wood.¹⁴

Off the coast lies the Mogador archipelago, which UNESCO describes as inseparable from the medina.¹⁵ Phoenician objects have been found on the island; around the beginning of the Common Era the Mauretanian king Juba II had purple dye extracted there from sea snails.¹⁶ Since 15 January 2005 the archipelago and dunes have been protected as Ramsar site no. 1469, now covering 1,520 hectares.¹⁷ It is the largest coastal archipelago on Morocco's Atlantic coast and a habitat of Eleonora's falcon.¹⁸

The climate is equable: the mean daily maximum is 18.4 °C in January and peaks at 22.6 °C in September; just under 300 millimetres of precipitation fall in a year, and on average none in July.¹⁹ The city lies under the influence of the Canary Current and the trade winds, hence its nickname, the City of the Trade Winds.²⁰

Gnawa music has been on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2019.²¹ Its roots go back at least to the 16th century; in the cities it includes night-time ceremonies with a stringed instrument and castanets, in the countryside communal meals in honour of saints.²² Essaouira has hosted a Gnaoua festival for almost three decades; the 27th edition, from 25 to 27 June 2026, brought 460 artists to the city.²³

Essaouira-Mogador airport lies about 16 kilometres south-east of the city; it was inaugurated in 1998 and has been in operation since June 1999.²⁴ According to ONDA it handled 310,436 passengers in 2025, 34.4 per cent more than the year before.²⁵