AgadirThe Atlantic Resort — Beach, Argan Forests and a City Rebuilt from Catastrophe
Agadir has in recent years become a destination for package holiday makers. It is not, in the conventional sense, a culturally rich destination. There is no historic medina — the 1960 earthquake destroyed the old city in fifteen seconds, killing twelve thousand people, and the city was rebuilt from scratch on a modern grid plan. There are no imperial monuments, no ancient souks, no labyrinthine lanes.
What Agadir has, and has in abundance, is ten kilometres of Atlantic beach, three hundred days of sunshine a year, a warm and reliable climate, an excellent harbour, and proximity to some of the most interesting landscapes in southern Morocco.
I include Agadir in this guide because it is part of Morocco’s story — because the earthquake and its aftermath are as much a part of that story as any dynasty’s architecture, and because the city has genuinely interesting dimensions that the beach-resort reputation tends to obscure.
The Souss valley, the Anti-Atlas mountains, the argan forest, the Amazigh culture of the region around the city: all of these are accessible from Agadir, and all of them are worth the journey.
The Earthquake and the Rebuilt City
On the night of 29 February 1960, at 11.47pm, an earthquake of magnitude 5.7 struck the area around Agadir. The destruction was total. The old medina — the Kasbah — was obliterated. The bidonvilles on the hillside below were flattened. The European quarter was destroyed. In fifteen seconds, approximately one third of the city’s population was dead.
The rebuilding began immediately under the direction of King Mohammed V, who came to survey the ruins and declared that Agadir would rise again. It did, though it rose as a completely different city. The new Agadir was planned by French and Moroccan urbanists on a rational grid, with wide boulevards, earthquake-resistant construction, generous parks and a seafront development oriented entirely toward the tourism economy that the king and his advisors correctly anticipated would be the city’s future. The old medina was never rebuilt; the ruins of the Kasbah hill were left as a monument to the dead, a quiet elevated space above the modern city where you can still read the outlines of streets and buildings in the rubble.
The rebuilt city works as a city — it is functional, relatively well-planned and has a quality of life that the more chaotic older cities sometimes struggle to offer. What it lacks is character, in the specific sense of a city whose form has been shaped by centuries of use and adaptation. Everything in Agadir is from the same period, built to the same specifications, and the result is a uniformity that is pleasant without being distinctive.
The Beach and the Sea
The beach at Agadir is, by any measure, exceptional. Ten kilometres of fine golden sand, sheltered from the Atlantic swell by the curve of the bay, reliably sunny from March to November and reasonably warm even in winter, it is among the finest urban beaches in Africa. The development along the seafront — hotels, restaurants, cafes, a new promenade — is concentrated enough to provide genuine amenity without overwhelming the beach itself. The Atlantic here is swimmable from May through October; outside those months it remains beautiful to walk along but cold to swim in.
The surfing at Agadir and along the coast to the north — particularly at Taghazout, half an hour up the coast — is among the best in Africa. Taghazout has developed from a hippie fishing village into a proper surf destination with good infrastructure and consistent swell. The point breaks north of the village — Panoramas, Killer Point, Anchor Point — are world-class when they are working, and the beach breaks at Agadir itself are good enough for beginners and intermediate surfers.
The Souss Valley and the Argan Forest
The Souss valley, stretching east from Agadir toward Taroudant and the mountains, is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in Morocco and the home of the argan tree — Argania spinosa — which grows nowhere else in the world except a small area of southwestern Morocco and provides the argan oil that has become one of Morocco’s most significant luxury exports. The argan forest covers several million hectares across the Sous-Massa plain and the lower slopes of the Anti-Atlas, and it is a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
The argan oil cooperatives — women’s cooperatives, established in the 1990s and 2000s with NGO support — are among the most successful examples of community-based fair trade in Africa. Women who were previously entirely dependent on subsistence agriculture have, through the cooperatives, developed incomes, skills and a degree of economic autonomy that has measurably changed their communities. I have visited several of the cooperatives over the years, and the quality of the organisation — and of the oil itself — is remarkable. A visit to a cooperative is not a tourist experience. It is an encounter with a genuinely transformative economic model.
If you go: Look for cooperatives bearing the Coopérative Marjane label or equivalent certifications rather than the roadside stalls that sell oil of uncertain provenance. The price difference is real; so is the quality difference.
The Kasbah Hill and the Memory of Old Agadir
Above the modern city, on the hill that once contained the old Agadir, the ruins of the Kasbah preserve a different memory of the place. The inscription on the walls, rebuilt after the earthquake, reads: ‘If fate is stronger than your strength and will, do not despair: the day will come when you will rise again.’ This is genuinely moving in context, and the view from the hill over the modern city to the bay and the Atlantic beyond is the best available perspective on the geography of the place.
The Amazigh Heritage Museum in Agadir is the finest museum in southern Morocco dedicated to the culture, history and art of the Amazigh people. Housed in a purpose-built building in the city centre, it contains an extraordinary collection of Amazigh jewellery, textiles, pottery and domestic objects that trace the history and material culture of the Berber peoples of the region across several centuries. Most of the objects were collected by the Berber scholar Bert Flint over fifty years of fieldwork. The quality and the honesty of the curation make it essential.
Amazigh Heritage Museum: Situated on Boulevard Hassan II at Place Ait Souss, in the heart of Agadir, the Amazigh Heritage Museum preserves the memory of the Berber people of the Souss-Massa region. It opened on 29 February 2000 — exactly forty years after the earthquake that destroyed the city — and houses more than 900 pieces tied to Amazigh culture and tradition. Highlights include traditional silver jewellery, regional rugs, ancient wooden tools, and doors typical of local architecture. Ancient manuscripts dating to the 16th century and fine pottery round out a collection that brings everyday Amazigh life vividly into focus. Guided tours are available in multiple languages.
The Anti-Atlas and the Sous-Massa Park
The Anti-Atlas mountains that frame the Souss valley to the south are among the most dramatically beautiful landscapes in Morocco and among the least visited. Older than the High Atlas, geologically, they have an eroded, stripped quality — red granite and quartzite in extraordinary formations — that is completely different from the snow-and-cedar character of the High Atlas further north. The mountain town of Tafraout, about an hour and a half from Agadir, sits in a valley of smooth pink boulders above almond groves that bloom spectacularly in February. The painted rocks outside the village — vast boulders covered in geometric patterns by the Belgian artist Jean Vérame in 1984 — are either wonderful or absurd depending on your sensibilities, but the landscape around them is undeniably extraordinary.
The Sous-Massa National Park, thirty kilometres south of Agadir, is one of the best wildlife reserves in Morocco: the estuary and dunes of the Sous and Massa rivers provide habitat for flamingos, spoonbills, herons and, most notably, the bald ibis — a critically endangered species that has one of its last wild colonies here. The park is easy to visit from Agadir and offers a quality of bird and animal watching that the rest of the tourist circuit largely ignores.
Agadir to me, works best as a base rather than a destination in itself. I would recommend staying two or three nights, relax and enjoy the beach and the sea, drive into the argan forest and the Anti-Atlas, eat the excellent fish in the harbour restaurants.
Treat the city as a comfortable, sun-drenched platform from which to explore one of the most interesting corners of southern Morocco.