Essaouira, and the coast the Atlas walks down to

Most visitors to Morocco meet the country from Marrakech outward, and the Atlas Mountains tend to feature as a single dramatic backdrop rather than a place to walk through. A route that starts in the mountains and ends on the Atlantic coast at Essaouira reverses that framing, treating the Atlas as the beginning of the journey rather than the scenery for it, and finishing at a town whose whole character has been shaped by the ocean the mountains eventually run down to meet.

From foothills to coast, on foot

The walking covers ground that a coach itinerary would cross in an afternoon: the Ouirgane valley and the villages below the High Atlas passes, over the Tizi n'Test into the Souss valley, and on towards Taroudant and the coast near Agadir before turning north along the shore to Essaouira. The terrain shifts noticeably as the route descends, from Atlas foothills with their walnut and argan groves, argan trees being largely unique to this part of Morocco and prized for the oil pressed from their kernels, to the drier, flatter Souss plain, to a final stretch along a coastline shaped far more by Atlantic wind than by anything happening a hundred kilometres inland.

A port built to be defended

Essaouira, known for much of its earlier history as Mogador, has been a trading post since Phoenician and Carthaginian times, but the fortified town visible today largely dates from the 1760s, when Sultan Mohammed III commissioned a French military engineer, Théodore Cornut, to design a new port and fortress town on the site. The result is unusual for Morocco: a walled medina with a distinctly European military logic to its ramparts and gun batteries, built to protect a port that handled sugar, tea and other goods moving between Europe, Morocco and trade routes further south. The blue-and-white paintwork now associated with the town is a more recent, twentieth-century convention rather than an original feature of Cornut's design.

Wind, and what it has been good for

Essaouira's near-constant Atlantic wind, strong enough that locals have long nicknamed it "the wind's city", has made the town one of North Africa's better-known windsurfing and kitesurfing destinations in recent decades, a modern use for a natural feature the old fortifications were originally built to work around rather than exploit. The same wind keeps the town noticeably cooler than inland Morocco through the summer months, one of the more reliable escapes from the heat that builds up over Marrakech and the desert further east. Its ramparts, walked as an open promenade above the harbour, give an easy vantage point over the fishing fleet below and the small offshore islands, the Iles Purpuraires, said to have been used by the Romans and Carthaginians before them to extract a purple dye from local shellfish, the same dye that gave Tyrian purple its reputation across the ancient Mediterranean as a colour reserved for royalty.

A town that kept its own pace

For much of the twentieth century Essaouira stayed a relatively quiet fishing port, well off the main tourist circuit that ran between Marrakech, Fes and the beaches further south. That changed gradually from the 1960s and 1970s onward, when the town's easy atmosphere and striking setting began drawing visitors in growing numbers, without ever quite matching the scale of Marrakech's tourism. The medina, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has kept much of its working character as a result: a functioning fishing harbour still lands its catch each morning at the same quay Cornut built his ramparts to protect, alongside the guesthouses and galleries that have grown up around it.

When to walk it

Spring and autumn suit this route best, mild enough in the Atlas foothills for comfortable walking and not yet, or no longer, at the peak of summer heat on the inland stretches before the coast cools things down. The coastal finish at Essaouira is pleasant for most of the year, but the wind that defines the town is at its brisk best, or most bracing, depending on temperament, through the spring and summer months.