Every great Moroccan journey needs an exhale, and Essaouira is ours. After the glorious intensity of Marrakech or the desert, the salt air and the screaming gulls and the blue fishing boats hauled up beneath the ramparts reset something in you.
It is a town built for wandering: a walkable, good-natured medina, galleries of Afro-Berber art, fish grilled hours from the sea, and the trance rhythms of the gnaoua, who have made this their spiritual home. Orson Welles filmed here; Hendrix drifted through; the wind never stops.
We use it as a coda — three nights to slow the pulse before the flight home. You leave Morocco not on a high of adrenaline but on a long, golden, wind-scoured calm. It is, we think, the right note to end on.
