Essaouira Beach

Essaouira is on Morocco's Atlantic coast, three hours west of Marrakesh, a fortified port town with a long beach running south from its walls. The Portuguese called it Mogador and the town's eighteenth-century medina, laid out by a French engineer for a Moroccan sultan, is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The wind is the constant. Northerly trades funnel down this coast almost daily from spring to autumn, strongly enough that the town was historically hard to enter under sail and is now one of the principal windsurfing and kitesurfing destinations in Africa. The same wind keeps the temperature down: Essaouira is fifteen degrees cooler than Marrakesh in August, which is why Marrakchis come here in summer.

The beach is a broad golden strand running several kilometres south to the Oued Ksob river mouth and the ruined Bordj El Berod beyond it. The Atlantic here is cold — the Canary Current again, high teens at best — with a shore break and rips. Camels and horses work the sand, and football is played on it at low tide in numbers.

Development is the walled medina, a working fishing port whose blue boats and gull-covered quay are the town's other image, and a low line of hotels along the front. Building inside the medina is constrained by its World Heritage status. Sidi Kaouki, twenty-five minutes south, is the quieter wind beach, and Diabat inland holds the ruined palace that gave Jimi Hendrix his local legend, which is a story the town tells and historians dispute.

The wind made this port hard to enter under sail and now makes it one of Africa's principal windsurfing towns, and it keeps the place fifteen degrees cooler than Marrakesh in August, which is why Marrakchis come. Cold Atlantic water, a shore break, an eighteenth-century medina that is a World Heritage site, and a fishing port whose blue boats are the town's other picture.