Essaouira's riches from the past

• Last Updated: November 19. 2009 10:27PM UAE / November 19. 2009 6:27PM GMT

Tahir Shah takes his son to Morocco’s western coast to dig out boyhood fantasies of pirates and buried gold

In the bustling lanes of Essaouira, on Morocco’s western coast, there’s a legend of pirates’ treasure. It says that the man who sees a stork with golden eyes will know where to dig for riches beyond his wildest dreams.

I first heard the legend half a lifetime ago when, aged six, I was taken to the windswept Atlantic town by my parents. They were obsessed with the place. Back then, in the early 1970s, the hippy bandwagon had just rolled in on the coat-tails of Jimi Hendrix, who had himself recently passed through. Our visit was against a bleary-eyed backdrop of tie-dye, VW Kombis, dropouts, sit-ins and hashish.

At six, I didn’t really know what a hippy was. But I remember vividly how I longed to find the stork with golden eyes. I begged my parents and then an assortment of delirious hippies to help me. None of them did. I was about to give up all hope when a shopkeeper selling jelaba robes touched me on the arm. “If you are looking for treasure, you will need a map,” he said.

“But where will I get one?” I replied.

The shopkeeper went into the back, bustled about, and returned 10 minutes later with a small sketchy treasure map. The ink was still wet. “I drew it from memory,” he said. “See here, it’s the stork with the eyes of gold.”

When I asked if the map was real, the shopkeeper pressed a hand to his heart and lowered his head. “It will be real if you believe in it,” he said.

I still have the treasure map. It’s all worn and tattered now, the paper yellowed by time. Sometimes I pull it out, glance at it and smile. Morocco is a land where the line between fact and fantasy is blurred in the most magical way. It’s an enchanted kingdom of A Thousand and One Nights, in a world more usually preoccupied by cell phones, speed and cyberspace. I’ve never forgotten the shopkeeper in Essaouira because he allowed a small boy visiting from grey old England to dream. His shop was a doorway into a land of pirates, of gallant knights and, best of all, of treasure.

A few days ago I visited Essaouira once again. This time I took my own son, Timur, with me. He’s six and a half, about the age I was when I first set eyes on the imposing stone ramparts, all bleak and imposing like something out of The Lord of Rings.

We arrived in the long shadows of afternoon, having driven south from our home in Casablanca along one of the most beautiful stretches of scenery in all Morocco. The sun was hovering over the Atlantic, waves crashing in, kite-surfers pirouetting in the space between the two.

All of a sudden it was 1971 again. I got a blinding flash of hippies dancing down the beach against the strum of an old flamenco guitar. The mirage vanished as quickly as it came. It was replaced by the cry of gulls diving on the Atlantic wind, and by the sound of waves crashing down on the shore.

We turned a corner and caught sight of the old stone Sqala, the citadel down by the harbour, like Rapunzel’s tower from a childhood fantasy. A little to the north, deluged in autumn light, was the great sea wall, lined with ancient iron cannons left centuries ago by the Portuguese. We climbed up and pretended we were firing them one by one.

As we leapt about, mimicking the sound of cannonballs splashing into the ocean, a man sidled up and held out his hand. At first I assumed he was soliciting alms. But there was something resting on his palm. A twist of paper. He nudged it towards us.

“What is it, Baba?”

I shrugged.

The hand was nudged forwards again. I prised apart the ends of paper. Inside was an ancient copper coin. It was so worn by centuries of merchants’ hands that its Arabic inscription was almost unreadable.

“Is it from a pirate treasure?” asked Timur, wide-eyed.

The old man stroked a hand over a fortnight’s stubble. “How did you know?” he asked. I looked at him hard. “Because his father is a storyteller,” I said coldly.

We bought the coin for an exaggerated sum. After all, it was almost certainly a fragment of a vast pirate hoard. Then we slipped back into the interlinking streets of the medina, the last strains of sunlight warming our backs.

Essaouira has become popular with tourists in recent years, most of all with those searching for wind and kite-surfing. It’s quite accessible from Marrakech (about three hours by car), and even a day trip provides a little respite from the searing summer temperature there. There are plenty of riad-style maison d’hotes, and ever more restaurants catering to foreign tastes. But despite the town’s popularity, Essaouira has stayed very much grounded in its past. The culture is forged on tradition, and upon a blend of conservatism that offsets the sometimes garish nature of the tourist trade.

The slender lanes of the lime-washed medina bustle with little workshops, carpenters busying away in the shadows of each one. They are moualems, master craftsmen, creating marquetry boxes and furniture carved from the aromatic thuya tree, whose boughs and gnarled roots are harvested from the surrounding region and found nowhere else.

The fragrance of the wood is intoxicating. Smell it once and you will always remember it, and be reminded of the cramped workshop from where it came. In the same way that listening to a seashell sparks vivid memories, so does pressing one’s nostrils to this scented wood.

Essaouira’s medina is unusual in that it was laid out, more than three centuries ago, by a French architect, on the orders of the Alaouite Sultan Mohammed III. It’s much more orderly than other medinas you find in Morocco, built from rugged blocks of stone. What I like best of all is that there are as many shops selling plastic buckets, rough wooden sieves, and bellows to the locals as there are others touting handicrafts to tourists. Essaouira is a town with its head screwed on right, with the balance of a kingdom rooted in the hinterland.

Spend a day or two in the medina and you can’t help but be bewitched by the raw energy of the place, its worn old sea walls battered by the relentless surf. It’s easy to understand why this Atlantic stronghold has been wooed and fought over by foreign powers since the Phoenicians arrived seven centuries before the birth of Christ.

The Phoenicians were the first of many invaders. Five hundred years later, the Romans conquered the town under Juba II. They built a fortified bastion and used it as a manufactory for Tyrian dye, a purplish colour derived from the murex species of sea snail. For the Romans it was highly prized for dyeing their senatorial togas.

Then came the rise of Islam and, in the 15th century, the Portuguese. They christened the city Mogador. The king of Portugal, Manuel I, ordered a fortress to be constructed named Castelo Real de Mogador, in 1506. But, like the Phoenicians and the Romans before them, the Portuguese hadn’t counted on the difficulty of protecting their remote fortress. They lost control of it only four years after its completion, trounced by local Berber tribes. In the decades that followed, Essaouira became a haven for pirates, who plied the Atlantic waters raiding European ships. And, if you believe the legends, you’ll find your heart pumping at the idea of treasure still buried along the shore.

The wonderful thing about living in Morocco is that you can explore a place throughout the year and watch how it’s affected by the seasons. Essaouira transforms like a chameleon. In autumn there’s the scent of change on the breeze, an anticipation of the approaching cold. In the winter, the sky goes indigo blue, touched with wisps of cirrus clouds, the sharp light blinding against whitewashed walls. There’s a sense of hibernation that is finally swept away with the dazzling onslaught of spring – without a doubt the most magical time to visit. In the summer, the city erupts with energy. It’s charged with an electric suspense at the annual Gnaoua Festival, held each June, the centrepiece of the tourist calendar.

The Gnaoua are an ancient mystical fraternity with their traditions sunk deep in African lore. Their music is a powerful blend of African and Arabic styles that also inhabits a twilight zone between this and the spirit world.

Sit at one of the medina cafes and, from a distance, you hear the distinctive clatter of qarkabeb, the oversized iron castanets, symbol of the Gnaoua brotherhood. As they come closer, their rhythmic music connects one’s soul to a strand of primeval human emotion. No matter how hard you resist, you find yourself being sucked in.

The most precious thing of all is taking someone you care for to a place you love. And that’s how it was taking little Timur to Essaouira the first time. When he was tucked in bed at the hotel, the ancient coin under his pillow, I told him about the pirate treasure, and the legend of the stork with golden eyes. He asked me why I had never told him before.

“Because I didn’t want you to get obsessed with it like me.”

“But, Baba, how ever will I find the stork?” he asked.

“By not looking for it.”

Timur sat up.

“Promise you will help me, Baba.”

I sighed.

“Of course I will.”

“How?”

“In the morning I’ll show you the treasure map,” I said.

travel@thenational.ae