What coastal seafood does Morocco have?

People are genuinely surprised by how much of a seafood country Morocco is, because the postcards are all desert and souks. But with a long Atlantic coast and a Mediterranean one, the catch is extraordinary and dirt-cheap by European standards. Sardines are the national fish — Morocco is one of the world's biggest exporters — and on the coast they're grilled over charcoal until the skin crackles, or butterflied, stuffed with chermoula and fried. A plate of just-grilled sardines with bread and a wedge of lemon by the harbour is one of my favourite cheap thrills anywhere.

Beyond sardines, the variety is huge: sea bream (dorade), sole, red mullet, sea bass, conger eel, monkfish, plus prawns, langoustines, squid, cuttlefish and crab. In Oualidia, the oyster capital, I've eaten oysters pulled from the lagoon an hour earlier; in Dakhla and along the south Atlantic the shellfish is some of the freshest I've ever tasted. The friture mixte — a heaped platter of assorted small fish and seafood fried golden — is the way locals eat, picking through it for hours with their hands.

The defining flavour, though, is chermoula. This green marinade — coriander, parsley, garlic, cumin, sweet paprika, a hit of lemon and good olive oil — is what makes Moroccan fish unmistakably Moroccan. It's smeared on before grilling, packed into the cavity of a whole fish, or used as the base for the country's signature fish tagine, where chunks of firm fish are laid over potatoes, tomatoes and peppers and gently steamed until the whole pot smells of the sea and the herb garden at once.

Where you eat it matters as much as what. The ritual I send everyone to is the port-side grill: at Essaouira's harbour you pick your fish from the morning's catch, watch it go on the coals, and eat it metres from where it was landed. Agadir's fish market does the same on a bigger scale. It's unfussy, smoky, salt-air food — and after a week of rich inland tagines, that first bite of charcoal-grilled coastal fish feels like the sea blowing right through the trip.