Essaouira

Essaouira occupies its own elegant category in the Moroccan imagination: a fortified Atlantic port city of whitewashed walls and blue-painted shutters, perched on a windswept headland where the Saharan trade winds meet the cold upwelling of the Atlantic Ocean. Its Portuguese-influenced ramparts, recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, constitute one of the finest examples of European military architecture on the African continent — a reminder that Essaouira was, for centuries, Morocco's most important Atlantic port and the terminus of the great trans-Saharan gold and salt routes.

The medina of Essaouira is compact, manageable and dramatically different in atmosphere from the imperial cities of the interior. The streets are straight and wind-scoured, lined with blue-shuttered whitewashed houses and galleries selling the work of the city's thriving contemporary art scene. Essaouira has been an artists' colony since the 1960s and 70s, when Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens and Frank Zappa all made famous visits; the tradition continues today in a dozen permanent galleries and studios. The gnawa music of Essaouira — descended from the spiritual healing traditions brought by West African enslaved peoples to Morocco — is one of the most distinctive and deeply affecting musical forms in Africa.

The port itself is a working fishing harbour whose vessels return each morning with the day's catch of sardines, sea bass and calamari. The fish market beside the ramparts and the row of grill restaurants that follows offer some of the best and most honest seafood in the country. Eating grilled sardines on the ramparts with the Atlantic wind in your face is a Moroccan experience that has nothing to do with the desert or the souks — and is all the more valuable for it.

The beaches north and south of the city stretch for kilometres along an extraordinary arc of Atlantic coast. The constant trade winds make Essaouira one of the world's great windsurfing and kitesurfing destinations.