Exceptional properties from Essaouira to Agadir

Mogador, the ancient beauty, hasn't aged a day in spite of its two millennia of history. Founded by the Phoenicians and then the Romans, it was first revived in the 16th century with the arrival of the Portuguese. Faced with resistance from the local population, this attempt to create a trading post failed.

Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah, with the assistance of French engineers, gave Mogador its current appearance: a modern fortress whose power is still imaged by the bronze cannons of the Skala, stone houses and palaces with magnificent vaulted warehouses, parade grounds and towers.

This magical site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001. The “port of Timbuktu”, in reference to trade relations with the Saharan tribes, attracted a cosmopolitan population of sailors, merchants and craftsmen, notably cabinetmakers and lutiers, among whom the Jewish community played a major role in the city's development.

Today, Essaouira has expanded far beyond the walls of Mogador. A hippie town a few decades ago, it has earned its stripes as one of Morocco's leading tourist resorts: seaside, golf, cultural with the Gnaoua festival, residential with beautiful riads, magnificent villas dotted around the argan and juniper forests, ambitious tourism projects in the direction of Sidi Kaouki and the magnificent vineyards of the Val d'Argan.

The capital of the Souss region is a miracle-worker that has managed to erase the scars of the 1960 earthquake and bury them under mountains of ambitious, seductive projects.

Two figures to understand the rise of Agadir, the large Berber city in the south: 346,000 inhabitants in 2004, just under a million twenty years later.

The city has been transformed by the magnificent corniche, with its hotel park currently undergoing renovation, and by the expansion to the edge of the argan forests, with the university, the large stadium, an abundance of modern administrative buildings and a myriad of residences.

Rare vestiges of the past are the Soukh El Had, encircled by traditional walls, and the Agadir Oufella kasbah, whose airliners, perched like sparrowhawks on the promontory, seem to monitor the activity of the new tourist port.

For the past decade, Agadir has shared the glory with Thagazout, one of the Kingdom's flagship projects, with a string of palaces set on one of the country's most beautiful beaches.

In the surrounding area, surfers are having the time of their lives, in anticipation of further developments further north.