In four days, Marrakech can be conveniently explored, so in our last two days, we decided to book excursions outside of the town. Our hosts in the riad helped us to book two organized tours, one to Essaouira and one to the Atlas Mountains.
I will be honest; when we decided to travel to Essaouira, I googled it to see what to expect of this city. Some interesting pictures were coming into my sight about goat trees. I was pretty sure that it was some tourist attraction, but I still wanted to see it with my eyes. So when we were on the highway we stopped by one of these argan trees.
I read on the internet that the Berber people let the goat eat the fruit of the argan tree because they spit out the nut that women can collect from the ground. The nuts they use for producing the precious argan oil.
Argan oil is a product that the locals use as a food oil, and for medical purposes, and in the cosmetics industry. It became extremely popular worldwide. The argan tree looks quite similar to olive trees, and the nuts look like almonds.
Our next stop was in an argan oil factory where we could see the whole oil making process made totally by hand.
It is a pity we couldn’t spend much time at this oil making farm but the road was calling us, we had to turn on the engines again. Even on these good highways, it took us three hours from Marrakech to get to this blue coastal city.
If people call Marrakech the red city then Essaouira is definitely the blue city. The houses are painted in fresh white and blue colors.
The principle with Moroccan medinas is always that in the main streets you have the important souks like the food and spice souks. It was the same with this white-blue city as well and the colors of the souks made it like an artistic picture.
After strolling through the medina we stopped by a small kind of local eat cafe where we had a wonderful sweet fresh mint tea.
In the end, we walked down to the beach where we have seen fishermen returning in their blue boats, others already selling their daily catch, and seagulls waiting for their fish.
