Morocco

Essaouira is a walled 18th-century medina on Morocco's Atlantic coast, and the wind gets there before everything else does — the trade winds that made the town a legend among windsurfers also mean the surf is a winter proposition, standing up cleanly between autumn and spring when the wind finally drops. The main beach curves away from the ramparts; Sidi Kaouki, twenty-five kilometres south, takes the swell more seriously; Moulay Bouzerktoun to the north belongs to the wind. Jimi Hendrix passed through in the 1970s. The Gnawa musicians were already here, and their festival fills the town every June.

The hotels are all inside or against the medina walls, which is the point of staying here. L'Heure Bleue Palais is a 19th-century governor's palace restored by artisans from across Morocco — tiles from Fez, terracotta from Meknès — with a heated pool on the roof. Salut Maroc is an 18th-century merchant's house at the ramparts where each of the ten rooms takes a different Moroccan city as its brief. Madada Mogador sits at the medina's entrance and faces the Atlantic rather than turning inward. One town carries the whole Moroccan collection for now — and it earns it.