Essaouira Seafood Cooking Class — Cook the Day's Atlantic Catch

Essaouira is Morocco's most atmospheric fishing town — a fortified, whitewashed port on the Atlantic where the blue wooden boats still land the catch every afternoon and gulls wheel over the ramparts. A seafood cooking class here is built around that immediacy: you often start at the harbour or the fish market, choosing sardines, sea bream, sole, squid or prawns straight from the ice.

The cooking is coastal Moroccan at its simplest and best. You make charmoula — the coriander, parsley, garlic, cumin, paprika and lemon marinade — and use it to build a fish tagine layered over tomatoes, peppers and potatoes, and to dress whole fish for the grill. Essaouira's signature is the butterflied sardine, pressed in pairs around herbs and grilled, and you will learn to handle them the local way.

Being a relaxed, artistic town — long a haven for musicians and painters, and home to the Gnaoua festival — Essaouira's classes tend to be unhurried and personal, sometimes on a rooftop with the wind and the sound of the port. Hosts explain how the daily catch shapes the menu and how the town's Jewish and Portuguese history left traces in its food.

It is one of the most enjoyable places in Morocco to cook, precisely because the seafood is so fresh and the pace so gentle. Vegetarians can cook a vegetable tagine alongside, and the class pairs perfectly with an argan-oil cooperative visit on the surrounding plains.