Essaouira is like flowers.
Imagine a place apart from chaos, and you might be getting close. A garden spilling out past its ancient walls to line the ocean promenade, thin brown water beckoning from far — only from far.
Essaouira is like flowers, in the spring from every direction a plethora of colour arrives in the town.
Outside Bab Sbaa in Orson Welles Garden, Moroccan Toadflax springs up pink-and-white next to pale fountain grass. Linaria Moroccana and Pennisetum. Nearby a game of boules is being contested by Spanish tourists come from across the strait for a holiday.
Essaouira is like flowers, opening up to receive those who fly towards the bright white buildings and blue fishing boats.
In all shapes, sizes and colours they come. They come to Morocco because Morocco finds it very very hard to visit Europe. In spring they come to Morocco for culture and experiences but inevitably, though they take and take, leave still more. Essaouira is a captivating, welcoming oasis; a shimmering mirage of ocean in a desert nation being slowly swallowed by tourism.
Essaouira is like flowers, each petal another street or souk to visit in the name of culture before retiring to a terrace café to drink sweet mint tea — always ordering in French or English.
The locals don’t seem to mind the tour busses or poor attempts at salaam and shukraan. Unlike Marrakech where every interaction is punctuated with money, here the locals go about their business largely ignoring anyone they don’t know or need something from. And for this reason you can still walk freely through the town, meeting sunbathing cats down twisting alleys or purchasing fresh caught fish from a market stall, bones and blood and all.
Essaouira is like flowers, the stem never changes, only the adornments look different with the passing of quiet seasons into spring.
During the hot days the narrow medina streets are lined with tapestries, jewellery, snack menus, clothing stores and women grinding almonds into amlu. Colour pulses and undulates through the centre of town. Poor imitations of diplomats from all over the world are dressed in hiking clothes or road-dirtied brands. They haggle with merchants who couldn’t really care less where they are from, whether this is their first time in Morocco. They just want to sell their wares and move on to the next customer but they honour expectations by politely feigning interest and faking a smile.
Essaouira is like flowers, edged in an ocean with crumbling walls slowly revealing its secret serenity.
Through Bab Sbaa, out of the medina past the noise of tourist cameras snapping blue boats lined up in the harbour. Through the fish market with its gagging smells and discomforting sights on the knife-edge of shade under the old watchtower. Past the fishermen’s ramshackle storehouses lined up opposite huge fishing trawlers, stepping over playful stray kittens and around behemoth seagulls, up a few steps and around a precarious iron gate until you can walk along the sea wall with your back to the town. Salt spray with a tint of thick oil touches your lips while your ears catch snippets of conversation from voices hidden in the concrete tetrapods forming a breakwater. When the wind blows the right way — and it still does sometimes — and waves crash on the breakwater, Essaouira is a peaceful garden of beautiful weird flowers spilling out over its ancient walls.
