How is Moroccan pottery made?

Safi, on the Atlantic coast, is Morocco's pottery capital, and the first time I climbed the hill of kilns there I understood why — the whole hillside is honeycombed with workshops, smoke rising from wood-fired ovens, and stacks of bowls drying in the sun like rows of pale moons. The clay comes straight from the local earth, wedged and kneaded by hand until it is smooth and free of air, the way bread dough is worked.

The throwing is mesmerising. The potter sits at a low wheel that he spins with his own bare foot, drops a lump of grey clay onto the centre, and with wet hands pulls it up into a tagine base, a bowl, a tall water jar — the form rising out of the spinning clay in under a minute. There is no electricity in the most traditional workshops, just the foot, the wheel, and an extraordinary feel for the material. The thrown pieces are set out to dry hard in the sun before any decoration.

Then comes colour. The piece is dipped in a base glaze or painted freehand: Fes is famous for its deep cobalt "Fes blue" on white, Safi for vivid polychrome arabesques in green, yellow and turquoise. Painters work with a fine brush and a steady hand, the pattern flowing from memory, before the pottery goes into the kiln. The fire — traditionally fed with wood, olive pits and even old shrubs — reaches the temperature that fuses the glaze into a hard, glassy, food-safe surface. A second firing locks in the colour.

To watch the whole process, Safi's potters' quarter is the place — many workshops welcome visitors and you can see the wheel, the painting tables and the kilns in one visit. In Fes, the potteries at Ain Nokbi do the same for the blue-and-white tradition. Our private guides can arrange a workshop visit, and some studios will even let you sit at the wheel and feel for yourself how alive a lump of spinning clay really is.