The murex shells of the Purple Islands are not reddish-purple at all. This is not the murex purple of Essaouira. Reddish-purple is the color of spoiled flesh rotting in the sun. And I think humans are repulsed by it for biological reasons.
It's the color of pseudo-pretentiousness. There is something I find repulsive about that shade of purple. When you see a deep reddish-purple, and it reminds you of royalty, remember that it's just murex mucous. The pigment made of murex shells harvested in the Mediterranean and beyond is usually called Tyrian purple - reddish purple, rare and expensive throughout the ancient world, and sought after by the great rulers of the Old World. By 1,000 B.C., after two thousand years of use of the area by indigenous Berber fishermen, Phoenician traders set up trading villages, and were lured by the presence of murex shells, which contained glands of pigmented mucus. The Purple Islands have always dictated the importance of the area. These islands shield the bay, and Essaouira, from the open sea. The city sits right on the coast, facing out from a moon-shaped bay, which is protected by the Purple Islands. On some doors, where the paint is scuffed down to the bare wood, you can see the history of the door: one decade painted ultramarine, the next, azure, and then maybe majorelle or cerulean but it is blue all the way through, and the effect, of all this blue and white, against a blue sea and a blue sky, is of an enchanted sky fortress, disconnected from Earth.īut the blue paint is more connected to the sea than the sky, as is all of Essaouira’s history. If in Marrakech, the people find inspiration for their color palette in the sandstone hues of the desert and mountains, then in Essaouira, it is the sky and ocean, for Essaouira is a city of whitewashed walls and blue-painted shutters. The sky over the Atlantic coast is a deep blue, with only a few wispy, white clouds. If you don’t have enough rain, everybody suffers.”
That is when everybody here is the happiest. But here in Morocco, we celebrate the day when it rains. “When Europeans come to Morocco, they are coming for all the sunshine. “Water is life,” Hicham says while we eat barbecued fish on a coastal boardwalk in the fortress town of Essaouira.
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