Essaouira area
While staying in Essaouira, we spent one day in the surrounding area. We started by stopping at French horse stable. Beautiful horses!
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- wall painting
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- contemplating
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- “Hey, what’s up?”
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- good advice
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- “I need a haircut.”
The area south of Essaouira to Agadir is the special area for argon trees. Argon trees apparently only grow in two places in the world—southern Morocco and some place in Mexico. However, the trees in Mexico do not provide fruit. We have seen argon oil sold in several places in Morocco but this is the REAL place—where the trees grow! One classic image is that goats like to eat the argon leaves. There are many photos of goats climbing trees but we were told that many of those photos have goats tied in the tree. The ones we saw were not tied since as we watched them, they jumped from branch to branch and from tree to ground. We suspect there were so many goats in one tree because it seemed to be the only green tree around.
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- goats & argon
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- “Don’t bother me.”
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- “What’s up?”
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- peek-a-boo
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- argon fruit
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- feasting
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- farmer
We stopped at a women’s cooperative for argon oil and saw again how it is made. The women sang and danced for us also. We tasted bread with argon oil, argon oil and honey, and argon oil and ground almonds.
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- women’s coperative
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- husking fruit
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- bean and shell
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- roasting the beans
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- grinding the beans
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- squeezing out oil
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- squeezing out more oil
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- certified
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- women singing
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- tasting
In the rural areas, markets are often held on only one day of the week. We found a Berber market on our day. It was different than the souks since everything was outside.
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- donkey park
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- shoeing a donkey
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- market
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- tomatoes
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- market stands
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- pumpkins and squash
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- beans
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- sugar cone
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- transport
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- meat
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- going home loaded
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- need anything?
Our last stop was at a vineyard started by a French man in 1994. We enjoyed lunch there, tasting three types of wine—white, rose, and red.
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- the owner
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- products
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- aging in barrels
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- vineyard
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- lunch
