What is the Atlantic coast road trip from Casablanca to Agadir like?

I drive this route a few times a season and it is the most underrated road trip in Morocco. From Casablanca you can be in El Jadida in 90 minutes on a good motorway, and El Jadida's Cité Portugaise is the first real reward — a walled Portuguese town with an eerie underground cistern that you may recognise from Orson Welles' Othello. Most people skip El Jadida entirely, which is exactly why I like stopping there.

Oualidia, an hour further south, is where I tell honeymooners to slow down. It is a calm tidal lagoon famous for oysters, and lunch is a plate of them straight from the beds with a glass of cold Moroccan white. Then comes Safi, gritty and working — a sardine port and pottery town rather than a resort — before the road delivers you to Essaouira, the windswept blue-and-white star of the whole drive. I always build in two nights there.

The stretch from Essaouira to Agadir is the least interesting — roughly two and a half hours through argan country, with goats genuinely up in the trees. Agadir itself is a rebuilt 1960s resort city, not old Morocco; I treat it as a beach decompression at the end rather than a destination in its own right. If you want character over sunbeds, end in Essaouira instead and skip the last leg.

Practically: the roads are flat, well-surfaced and easy to self-drive, fuel is plentiful, and the climate is mild year-round thanks to the Atlantic. Give it three to four days minimum — anyone who tries to do Casablanca to Agadir in one push has misunderstood the point of the journey.