From Thursday 29 April to Saturday 1 May Essaouira hosts this annual spring festival of classical music. The concerts will take place at Dar Souiri, the Alliance Francaise and in a concert tent at Bab Manzah.
Highlights will include a performance of Carmina Burana; songs from Falla, Bizet and Debussy, and an operatic evening including arias from operas by Mozart, Donizetti and Offenbach. Read more.
“Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
Now Incy Wincy spider went up the spout again”
A strange side-effect of starting the work on the house was the growth of a huge number of spiders’ webs at the lower levels of the house. This may have been partly that existing webs became more visible as dust from the higher levels landed from above. But we prefer to believe that the spiders themselves moved down the building to escape the noise and disturbance. We’ve never seen so many webs all in one place!
A few weeks ago we got the permit from the Council to start with the ‘grattage’. This basically means scraping away the plaster from the walls, and the cement underneath.
For such an exotic sounding word, grattage is a thankless task – and especially for our stalwart builder Hakim, who has managed it pretty much single-handed.
The grattage revealed that our house is built of stone rather than brick, and with wooden beams resembling a Tudor construction.
In Morocco it is frequently claimed that treasure can be found in old houses – people used to hide valuables before fleeing in local dynastic disputes….sadly we have not yet found any….but we did uncover a fantastic old terracotta downpipe set into the wall, from roof to ground level, which is a kind of consolation.
We bought this chair thinking it was a barber’s chair but have discovered it is actually a dentist chair from a dentist Essaouira AUGH THE PAIN!!
…so we could not resist when we found this other one and it is a real barber’s chair
Walking in the medina and in the new town we have discovered these graffiti, election posters and advertising flyers. We liked them so much we thought of sharing them with you. If you go to Essaouira why don’t you try and find them!!
These are some of the old floor tiles left in our house.We are not too sure if we can save them all but we will try our best, shame not to…
…the tough go out and commission a load of stone candlesticks!
