A Sketchbook Tour of Essaouira: Wind, Blue Boats, and Mint Tea

Essaouira is a town that has been painted to death, and it knows it. The blue fishing boats, the seagulls, the ramparts where Orson Welles filmed Othello — every angle has been sketched, photographed, and turned into a postcard. And yet. The wind. The wind is what makes it different. It comes off the Atlantic with real force, bending the gulls sideways and whipping the surface of the harbor into a churn of white and gray. You cannot paint Essaouira as a static postcard, because nothing here holds still. The boats rock, the flags snap, the light shifts every few seconds. You have to paint it as it is: restless.

I spent five days in a riad just inside the medina walls, and I developed a routine. Mornings at the fishing port, where the blue boats come in and the auction happens in a blur of shouting and hand gestures. Afternoons on the ramparts, where the wind is strongest and the views are best. Evenings in a café on Place Moulay Hassan, nursing a mint tea and sketching the crowd. The port in the morning is the best place to draw. It's loud and chaotic, but the light is clean and the boats are packed so tightly that you can draw one hull and let the rest blur into a mass of blue.

Drawing the Medina Without Getting Lost

The medina is a maze, and that's not a cliché — it's a practical problem. Streets turn back on themselves. Alleys end in walls. I got lost three times on my first day and eventually gave up trying to navigate, which turned out to be the right approach. I started drawing corners instead of vistas: an arched doorway, a stack of tagines, a cat asleep on a step. These small drawings are more useful to me now than any panoramic sketch of the ramparts. They're specific. They're places I actually stood.

Tea, Patience, and the Art of Being Watched

In Essaouira, you will be watched while you draw. Children will gather. Men will lean over your shoulder and offer opinions. A shopkeeper will bring you tea and ask to see the page. I learned early to say yes to all of it. The tea is good, the opinions are usually kind, and the interruptions become part of the drawing. One afternoon, a boy of about ten sat next to me for an hour and corrected my perspective on a boat. He was right. I fixed it. That drawing is now one of my favorites, not because it's good but because it's a record of a conversation. Sketching in public is a social act, and Essaouira is a social town. Lean into it.