Atlantic & Mediterranean

Essaouira is Morocco's wind capital: 300 days of Atlantic breeze have shaped its culture, its music (Gnawa) and its surf. The walled medina, blue fishing boats and 18th-century sea bastions make it one of the world's most beautiful port cities. Agadir offers Morocco's finest beach — 9km of Atlantic sand backed by the Atlas. Dakhla, a lagoon peninsula in the Sahara, is the world capital of kitesurfing: flat water, constant 25-knot trade winds, year-round. Tangier is where two seas meet, where Paul Bowles wrote, and where the Kasbah looks over the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. Asilah's white ramparts and annual mural festival give it a Caribbean feel — but entirely Moroccan.