What is the history of Essaouira (Mogador)?

Essaouira is my favourite place in Morocco to exhale. The site, long called Mogador, had been used by Phoenicians and Portuguese, but the city you walk today was deliberately created in the 1760s by Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, who wanted a modern Atlantic port to channel European trade through royal control.

What makes it unusual is that it was planned. The sultan hired a French engineer, Théodore Cornut, to lay out the star-shaped seafront ramparts and the regular street grid — a touch of Vauban-style European fortification grafted onto a Moroccan medina. That is why Essaouira feels so different from the organic tangle of Fes or Marrakech, and why UNESCO recognised it as an exceptional example of an 18th-century fortified port town.

For a long stretch Essaouira was one of Morocco’s great cosmopolitan trading cities, with a large and influential Jewish merchant community whose families handled much of the sultan’s overseas commerce. You can still find the old mellah quarter and the synagogues, and that layered Muslim-Jewish-European history is part of what gives the town its gentle, tolerant character.

I send guests here to slow down: the wind keeps it cool, the fishing harbour smells of grilled sardines and fresh paint on blue boats, and the Gnaoua music spills out of doorways. Practically, it is an easy two-and-a-half-hour drive from Marrakech, ideal for two or three unhurried nights. Watch the sun set from the sea ramparts, where the cannons still point out over the Atlantic.