A weekend in Essaouira, Morocco

“Here is Orson Welles standing at this bar, when he was filming Othello,” he says, pointing to a black and white photograph above the bar. The film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952. “And this is him with his daughter, when he came back to visit afterwards. We love him because he loved Essaouira.”

The bar is a gem, and must be preserved, even though the hotel, the first of several built along the beach promenade, is currently being renovated. Further down the coast is the new Mogador Resort, with a Gary Player design golf course and views over the Atlantic. Out to sea are the Purple Islands, now an uninhabited bird sanctuary. Centuries ago, the islanders extracted a dye from Murex sea snails to make the prized imperial purple cloth for the Roman Empire.

Stormy Weather Next morning, we head towards the main square, Place Moulay Hassan, for a walking tour of the medina. Mohamed, our guide, leads the way, the black tassel on his red Fez hat rotating, beige selham cloak swaying, and his footsteps revealing decorated insoles in his yellow babouche slippers. Through the streets of the medina or walled city we go; then up a ramp to the circular north tower of the Skala de la Ville.

Three miles of ramparts surround the citadel of Mogador, as it was called when built by the Portuguese in the 15th century. Along the wide walkway, cannons line up, pointing out to sea. The sky is a forbidding gray, instead of the usual friendly blue. Seagulls coast on the alizés, or coastal breezes, whipping up the Atlantic Ocean.

Thundering waves crash against the walls beneath us, lash out and rise up higher than twice the height of jagged rocks, spitting drops of water at us. We return to the medina, a laid-back, bohemian kind of place that attracts local and international artists, musicians, and film makers. The movie “Alexander” was filmed here in 2004, followed by Kingdom of Heaven in 2005. Shops, workshops, and art galleries line the streets of the old Jewish quarter and old diplomatic area.


“This was Orson Welles’s favorite hammam,” Mohamed tells us on a street corner, “where Iago was filmed killing Rodrigo in Othello.” Traditional arts and crafts of the region are displayed in the Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdallah Museum, named after the sultan who built the medina in the 18th century. It is one of the easiest medinas to find your way around in Morocco, because it is designed on a grid system. The medina is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with a combination of Moroccan and European styles, white walls, windows painted blue, and limestone trims.

In the days when camel caravans arrived here from Timbuktu by way of Marrakesh, merchants would stay in the old caravanserai where the courtyard is paved with different sizes of pebbles arranged in patterns. Mohamed demonstrates how, after long hours standing on their feet, traders would rock to and fro on the pebbles to give themselves a foot massage, or relieve an aching back. The cafés around the courtyard are good places to enjoy a mint tea break. The slate gray sky is getting darker by the minute. It starts bucketing down. Plans to see the fishing port, or go riding with turbaned horsemen on the beach have to be canceled. The Atlantic is now a raging, elemental force of nature. The beach is buried under wave after wave of foaming surf, crashing in and spilling over onto the road, and the Purple Islands seem like a figment of the imagination, lost behind an impenetrable curtain of mist and rain.

By nightfall, the storm is over. Rachid, a Moroccan friend, invites us to a smart party in a marquee on the beach. The evening’s highlight is a performance by gnaoua musicians, who belong to a religious brotherhood. Rachid translates some lyrics. “O my God, you know what I have in my heart.” It is said that their music can send people into a trance. Singing joyous songs and playing compelling music are six gnaoua dressed in blue, wearing caps decorated with cowrie shells.

Their leader is Hamid Al Kesri, one of the most popular guembri (three-stringed bass instrument) players. His deep, resonant voice combines with the notes from his three-stringed guembri, to sound like one sublime musical instrument. A gnaoua leaps off the stage, down to the dance floor; gliding from side to side as if his feet are roller-skates. For a while, six guest musicians from different countries join them on stage. It is an exhilarating experience.  

People are dancing and jumping up and down on the dance floor. This must be a taste of what it is like, when The Gnaoua and World Music Festival are held here in June each year.

Tea with Hisham 

Wind and kite surfers are back on our final day, taking advantage of the sea breezes, skimming the waves off the beach. We explore the medina at leisure, and chat with friendly shopkeepers selling jewelry, rugs, wooden boxes, and carved and inlaid objects made from fragrant thuja wood. Along an alley just inside the city walls, we stop and admire the work of tailors and artisans making musical instruments. The Espace Othello art gallery and riads with inviting courtyards draw us in through open doorways. The walls of Hisham’s apothecary shop, near the fish market, are lined with clear jars of herbs, spices, and pigments. He offers us tea, and fetches a tray, a teapot of hot water, and glasses. Then he drops a bit of this and that into the pot. It tastes harmless and pleasant enough for us to happily accept a second glass.
 
Before leaving, we discuss perfumes, special spice mixtures created by his mother, and pigments (used to color paints and dye wool or cloth) with evocative names like Mogador Blue. Baskets of snails and the day’s catch of moray eels, rays, and bream are spread out on the fish market stalls. On the way out, Ahmed stops us for a chat, urging us to buy his solid perfumes with these words of wisdom: “Amber is for women to attract men. Musk is for men to attract women.”

It is night when we leave Essaouira, as it was when we arrived. On our two-hour journey here by bus across the plain from Marrakesh, the sunset lingered on for well over an hour with the sky ablaze, darkening, lighting up again. Rekindling like the embers of a fire, red, orange, and charcoal gray. Related Articles The Penghu Islands: A Retreat From the Retreats Tonight, we drive past the beach where groups of people stroll up and down the long, wide, curved, and spot-lit strip of sand; past the hotel where the barman looks so much like Bogart, on the way to Casablanca to catch our flight back home.

Myrisa Luke caught the travel bug at an early age. She is a travel writer whose work and photographs have been published in the U.K., America, Australia and Canada.



Myrisa Luke
The Epoch Times