ON MY FIRST NIGHT IN ESSAOUIRA a man tried to sell me a ghost.
We were sitting on the ramparts facing the sea, the searing winter wind on our faces, sipping our café noir. The man, a local, with a Portuguese name held a clenched fist in my direction.
‘It’s in here,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘The ghost.’
‘How much is it?’
‘A hundred dirhams.’
‘Why’s it for sale?’
The vender frowned.
‘I’ve no need for it,’ he said.
‘Well, what use is it to me?’
‘Believe, really believe,’ he said, ‘and this ghost will be the keyhole into your dreams.’
There is something about Essaouira, the former Portuguese city clinging to Morocco’s Atlantic coast, which touches all who venture there. It’s a hybrid, a meeting point of East and West, one of those rare destinations where you never quite know who you’ll meet. The only certainty is that you will leave it different from when you came.
In atmosphere, Essaouira is quite unlike the imperial cities of Morocco’s interior. It’s magically desolate, almost like a forbidden enclave perched at the end of the world. The buildings are stone: thick grey walls, standing proud to the wind and to the freezing Atlantic waters. They form a stark and alluring canvas for a thousand colours – carpets hanging for sale in the souqs, skeins of wool dripping with dazzling dyes, panniers of glinting red mullet being hauled up from the port.
Spend a few days there, traipsing up and down the ramparts with their weatherworn Portuguese cannons, or down the orderly stone streets laid out by the French, and you forget that the rest of Morocco – or the rest of the world – exists. For me, that’s the extraordinary power of the place, a power that’s lured visitors for centuries.
The Phoenicians moored their ships at Essaouira in the seventh century BC. Five hundred years after them, the Romans arrived under Juba II. They used their base there as a manufactory for Tyrian purple dye, a colour derived from murex sea snails, prized for dyeing the Senatorial robes. Then came the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. They christened the city ‘Mogador’ and, after them, Essaouria became a haven for pirates, who plied the Atlantic waters raiding European ships. The medina was laid out in about 1760, by French engineers, on the orders of the Alaouite Sultan Mohammed III. Having glimpsed the natural strategic position, he built a naval base there, and one devoted to trade.
I myself was first drawn to Essaouira by the scent of the wood. The narrow lanes of the lime-washed media are packed with tiny workshops, carpenters busy in the shadows of each. They are master craftsmen, moualems, creating marquetry boxes, carved from the aromatic thuya tree, whose gnarled roots are harvested from the surrounding region. I first smelled the fragrance when taken there as an infant. Essaouira was a destination then on the hippy trail: VW combos, tie-dye and the fresh memory of Jimi Hendrix, who’d just swaggered out of town. Smell those roots, get their aroma deep into your chest, and they lure you back like the scent of lotus flowers on the wind.
The baby-boom hippies may be gone now, but you can still feel their presence. I am never sure whether they came to Essaouira because of the community’s free-thinking attitudes, or if they actually changed the place.
Go down to the beach and you’ll find surfers aplenty, some of them the children of hippies who were here a generation ago. They come from all over the world to do battle with the ferocious winter waves. And in the narrow streets of the old city, tie-dye, dreadlocks, and illicit tobaccos are also in plentiful supply.
As the severe winter chill melts into spring, Essaouira’s atmosphere transforms like a chameleon. The skies turn indigo blue, daubed with wisps of cirrus, the sharp light radiant against white-washed walls. And as spring slips into summer, the city is charged with electric anticipation at the annual Gnaoua Festival, held each June.
An ancient mystical fraternity with their roots sunk deep in African lore, the Gnaoua conjure music that’s a powerful blend of African and Arab, a bridge between this and the spirit world.
Sit at one of the medina cafés and from a distance you hear the distinctive clatter of qarkabeb, the oversized iron castanets, symbol of the Gnaoua. As they come closer, their rhythm shaking the soul, they have the power to send locals and foreigners into trance.
On the night I was offered a cut-price ghost, a group of four Gnaouas swept into the café in which we were sitting. The clatter of their iron castanets was like an exorcism rite, chasing out the demons.
The man beside me held his fist above his head.
‘They can smell it,’ he said.
‘Smell what?’
‘The ghost, the gnaoua… look at them!’
I turned in time to see one of the troupe collapse to the floor. He began writhing, his eyes rolled back.
‘It’s quite normal,’ said the man, darkly.
‘Are you sure?’
The ghost-seller nodded.
‘I speak the truth,’ he said. ‘I swear it, on all I hold sacred.’