Dakhla
— — the colour the trade wind leaves on the lagoon.
Not only on a wall.
“A forty-kilometre finger of sand reaches south from the Moroccan coast, sheltering a shallow lagoon from the Atlantic. The trade wind comes in steady from the north most afternoons. Greater flamingos work the far shore where the freshwater seeps meet the salt. Kitesurfers crowd the bay in winter. Past the dunes the road runs out into Mauritania. Nobody passes through here on the way to somewhere else.
Dakhla, 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.
Dakhla sits on a 40-kilometre peninsula extending into the Atlantic about 550 kilometres south of Laayoune and 1,500 kilometres south of Casablanca. The peninsula encloses a shallow lagoon — Dakhla Bay — that runs roughly 37 kilometres long and 12 wide. The town is the capital of the Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab region and home to around 106,000 people. Founded by the Spanish in 1884 as Villa Cisneros, it came under Moroccan administration in 1979. The N1 highway is the only land route in, running south from Laayoune across the Saharan plain.
The lagoon is shallow enough across most of its area that you can wade hundreds of metres without losing your footing. Atlantic tides flush the bay through a narrow northern mouth, keeping the water cool and clear. The trade wind — the alizé — blows steady from the north most days between March and October, raising a flat chop on the inner lagoon. The far eastern shore holds salt pans and the freshwater seep where greater flamingos feed. The peninsula itself is a thin spine of dune between the bay and the open ocean.
Dakhla draws kitesurfers in winter, when the alizé is consistent and the lagoon is warm enough to ride in a shorty. The PKRA tour has stopped here. Outside the kite season the town stays quiet — fishing, a small Spanish colonial centre, the long drive south toward the Mauritanian border at Guerguerat, 360 kilometres further. Royal Air Maroc flies daily from Casablanca via Agadir. Most visitors come for a week and stay in camps strung along the lagoon's western shore.