Agadir
— — the white city the sea returned to.
Not only on a wall.
“A long crescent bay on the Atlantic, with a low white city stepping back from the sand. Agadir was rebuilt almost entirely after the 1960 earthquake that flattened the old town in fifteen seconds; the new city below is wide, level, modern. Above it, on the hill at Agadir Oufella, the kasbah's outer wall still stands, a ruin kept as a memorial. The wind comes hard off the ocean most afternoons. The light is the soft, salt-paled light particular to this stretch of the Moroccan coast.
Agadir, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Agadir is the principal city of the Souss-Massa region on Morocco's Atlantic coast, about 460 kilometres south of Casablanca and 175 kilometres south of Essaouira. The city sits at the foot of the Anti-Atlas mountains on a wide, north-facing bay. The current population is roughly 600,000, making it Morocco's tenth-largest urban area. The port at the south end of the bay is one of the country's most important fishing harbours; the city is also the centre of a large argan-oil producing region. The municipal flag and seal still carry the year 1960, the year the old city was destroyed and the new one founded.
On the night of 29 February 1960, a magnitude-5.7 earthquake struck Agadir at 23:40 local time. The shaking lasted about fifteen seconds and killed roughly 15,000 people, more than a third of the city's population at the time. The medina, the Talborjt quarter, and most of the kasbah on the hill were destroyed. The decision was made to rebuild on flatter ground south of the old site, in a low, modernist plan. The outer wall of Agadir Oufella above the bay was stabilised and kept as a memorial; a Tifinagh and Arabic inscription on the gate reads, in translation, fear God and honour the king.
The seafront promenade runs about six kilometres along the bay from the marina at the north end to the port at the south. A cable-car opened in 2023 carries visitors from the foot of the hill to the kasbah ruin at about 236 metres. The souk in the new city, the Souk El Had, is one of the largest in Morocco, with over 6,000 stalls inside a walled enclosure. Taghazout, the surf village 19 kilometres up the coast, draws longboarders to a long right-hand point break. The wind on the bay is reliable; sailing dinghies and small kitesurfers run most afternoons from May through September.