Loading ...Atlantic discovery: Morocco’s Forgotten Coast
SOURCE: FINANCIAL TIMES
BY: STANLEY STEWART
In the small room at the top of the stairs, there was only one other visitor, an old man with a stick, perched on the edge of a pew. Awash with sea light, the room felt like a ship’s lookout. Through tall windows I could see the Atlantic. Watery reflections rippled across the ceiling.
The room had been a tiny synagogue. There are almost no Jews left in Essaouira now, and for some years it had lain in ruins. But a recent restoration had recovered the pews, the raised pulpit, the blond woods of the Aron Hakodesh with its slender columns — originally a gift from the Jews of Livorno in 1860. All along the coast, it was like this — the relics of other worlds, of memories unearthed, on the edge of a sparkling Atlantic swept by trade winds.
“The last time I was here I was 12,” the old man said. “With my parents.” He put his blue-veined hands out to either side as if to indicate where they had sat. “I have thought of this place every sabbath since, for 60 years. Of the sea, the wind, the gulls crying, the drying fish.” He smiled suddenly and I helped him to his feet. “Listen to me,” he laughed. “I sound like an old man.”
My Morocco has always been the landlocked south, Marrakech and the Atlas, and the fringes of the Sahara beyond, its oases guarded by sentinel kasbahs. It is too easy to forget that Morocco is also a country of the sea. Its Atlantic coast is almost 2,200km long, a coast that was its primary engagement with the outside world.
All the usual suspects had been carried here on the trade winds — Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vikings, Normans, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and finally the French swarming ashore at Casablanca in 1907. Compared with the isolated Berber villages of the Atlas, life here has been an international merry-go-round.
The fortress at El Jadida, a medieval Portuguese city, walled and moated by the sea © Getty Images It helps that it is beautiful — the long idyllic beaches backed by dunes and quiet lagoons full of birds, the wonderful surfing, those winds for windsurfing, the skies open to the Atlantic, the sense of sea voyages and movement, and the string of charming walled towns, like stepping stones down this coast, left behind by other peoples, echoing with memories of Portuguese explorers and Barbary pirates.
I began in Casablanca, where the francophone atmosphere is as pungent as the lingering whiff of Gauloises on its café terraces. Casablanca is like a rather faded Marseille, on which it was modelled, with palm trees and splendid whitewashed Art Deco buildings beached like old liners along wide, arrow-straight boulevards.
There is a cathedral called Sacré-Coeur, the Cinema Rialto where Edith Piaf sang, and the apartment building, now festooned with dangling wires and pigeons, where Saint-Exupéry once lived. On the wall of my hotel room was a faded photograph of Coco Chanel, languorously smoking.
People like to say that modern Casablanca is nothing like the film. But in fact, it is exactly like the film. It is still a cosmopolitan refuge, it is just that the refugees have changed; these days they are more likely to be from Libya or Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick would still feel at home here among a motley but sophisticated crew of runaways, dreamers and chancers, as well as French expats who could not bear to go home.
My guide — an architecture student from Mauritania — took me to the sprawling fish market, where we bought glossy kingfish steaks that the restaurant next door grilled for us. Our waiter ended up joining our table. He was seeking advice about a lover he had met on an unlikely visit to Birmingham, and who may or may not have been waiting for him in Paris. I told him to remember that he would always have Birmingham.
Aside from all those wonderful Art Deco buildings, the most notable architecture in Casa is the Mosque of Hassan II, completed in 1993. It is vast — people like to point out that you could fit Rome’s St Peter’s inside. If you include the mosque courtyard, there is elbow room for more than 100,000 people. It sits on the sea so that its worshippers might “contemplate God’s sky and ocean”. It has marble from Agadir, cedar wood from the Atlas, glass from Murano and the kind of soaring space that could double as an aircraft hangar.
A couple of hours down the coast, past white farmsteads marooned in fields of terracotta-coloured tilled earth, lay El Jadida, where there is a different sense of scale. To the south of the town are long and splendid beaches, virtually empty on the warm autumn days of my visit.
But the old walled town at its heart is a place apart. Step through any of its three gateways and you are in a small medieval Portuguese city, walled and moated by the sea. The Portuguese built their first fort here in 1502, and only abandoned the city in 1769 when the inhabitants finally departed tearfully for new colonies in Brazil.
Of all the ghosts on this coast, the Portuguese are my favourites. They were the pioneers in Europe’s Age of Exploration. Brave souls such as Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama began to feel their way down the coast almost six centuries ago, in ships hardly larger than a family sailboat, dreaming of India and China and the Indies. Just over 30 years after Prince Henry’s death, Columbus would be standing on a beach in the Americas.
But it is the Portuguese ambivalence that I love. Full of derring-do, they travelled to the ends of the Earth only to find that, when they got there, they were homesick. Portuguese literature and music are steeped in notions of exile, loneliness and nostalgia for home and loved ones. And these old Portuguese ports, like El Jadida, contain that bittersweet melancholy.
Inside the main gate, hardly wide enough for a modern car, is the 16th-century Portuguese Church of the Assumption and, just behind it, a mosque, whose minaret once served as a lighthouse.
At the far end of the single central street, where the aroma of fresh bread wafts out of a hole-in-the-wall bakery, is the great sea gate through which the last Portuguese governor departed. Up on the battlements, an elevated world swept by Atlantic winds, courting couples were finding a privacy that is rare in Morocco.
Like an underground cathedral, the 16th-century Portuguese Cistern in El Jadida is one of the most atmospheric spaces in Morocco © Alamy In the middle of the town, a flight of stairs leads down into the Portuguese Cistern, one of the most atmospheric spaces in Morocco. Built in the 16th century as an arsenal, it is like an underground cathedral, its aisles pierced by sudden shafts of light and demarcated by slender columns with elegant fan capitals.
Flooded with shallow water, the place has a dreamlike chiaroscuro atmosphere, light and shadow, solid stone and quavering reflection. Orson Welles came here to shoot scenes for his film version of Othello, playing with images of what is real and what is not.
My hotel was the former customs house, set around a cobbled and fountained courtyard. Its walls were lime-washed, its floors creaky and uneven, and its windows looked out over the harbour and the sea, so you could watch the fishing boats making their way home and the weather approaching.
Across the hall was a small parlour of old armchairs and board games, framed pictures of ships and tattered books in five languages about the history of this strange coast. In the evening, the exquisitely melancholy sound of fado wafted up from a radio in the courtyard below. Fado is the music of Lisbon, full of that longing and nostalgia.
Another couple of hours south, past robed shepherds leaning on long crooks amid goats drifting across stony slopes, and I arrived at Oualidia, the finest seaside resort on this Atlantic coast. While the outer shore is battered by thrilling waves, a long sea lagoon sheltered by a barrier of dunes is a peaceful place of tides and birds, a retreat for paddleboarding and kayaking.
The terrace at La Sultana in the seaside resort of Oualidia La Sultana is one of the most luxurious hotels on this coast On its shores is one of the coast’s most luxurious hotels — La Sultana. There is a first-rate spa, an infinity pool, a palm court and palatial rooms with balcony hot tubs, where you can watch constellations sink towards America. In the wonderful restaurant, you choose your lunch from tanks of live sea urchins, razor clams, crayfish, spider crabs and lobsters the size of small dogs.
I set off one morning on a boat trip down the lagoon, where pink shoals of flamingos were wading towards salt marshes. Herons, curlews and sand pipers patrolled the shores, while storks, pausing on their migration between Europe and South Africa, nested on rooftops and telephone poles. Fishermen rowed their skiffs back and forth, laying nets, while others waded through the reeds collecting razor clams.
On the far shore of the lagoon, I climbed the dunes to a tiny mosque, hardly bigger than a garden shed. Inside were simple whitewashed walls and a scrap of carpet orientated to Mecca. It would have fitted into a side cupboard in Casablanca’s Hassan mosque. But isolated here, with the roar of the sea coming from beyond the crest of these dunes, it spoke a hundred times more eloquently about hope and faith.
From the top of the dunes, I looked down on a great tumult of waves crashing on a long strand. A sumptuous picnic was being laid out beneath an awning in a sheltered bay of the beach below. With the Atlantic tumbling in, lifting veils of spray, I had my own moment of nostalgia, remembering childhood picnics on empty Atlantic beaches in Donegal, and my mother arriving with a hamper, these same Atlantic winds flapping her dress. Same winds perhaps, but different weather. It had probably been raining in Donegal, and we were probably wearing sweaters.
It was probably windy when Sir Francis Drake had his Christmas lunch on this coast at Essaouira in 1577. At any rate, he wasn’t impressed with the fare, describing it as “a verie ugly fish”. Essaouira is still a windy place and easily the most popular of these coastal towns, barely a couple of hours’ drive from Marrakech. The winds cool the town through the hotter months, and have made Essaouira one of the world’s best wind- and kitesurfing destinations.
The old medina here is full of people who have long since gone out of fashion in our own world — match-sellers, itinerant greengrocers, water-sellers, knife-sharpeners, doorstep grannies, street-corner card sharks.
Bakers’ boys scuttled back and forth with long wooden platters of fresh bread, while the shouts of the rag-and-bone men echoed down the long alleyways. Market stalls had piles of glossy pomegranates and marble slabs of sardines fresh from the sea.
With its long blank walls, and lanes that tunnelled beneath archways, the medina began to feel less like a city and more like a great rambling mansion, full of secrets and obscure relations. In its meandering hallways, residents paused to speak in whispers.
I found Slat Lkahal, the old synagogue, through a blue door and up a narrow staircase. Like so many of the old port towns on this coast, Essaouira was populated with Moroccan Jews as sultans such as Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah sought to restore Moroccan control of its coastline.
In 1960, there were 48 synagogues in Essaouira serving a population of 70,000 Jews. But tensions in the Middle East mean that only 50 Jewish people remain today, and its synagogues, when they have been restored, are museums.
My friend, reminiscing about his life here as a boy, was visiting from Israel. I helped him down the stairs. Fresh sea breezes greeted us as we emerged on to the street. “The alizé,” the old man smiled. “The trade winds. They brought the world to this coast.”