The landmark, explained
Skala de la Ville: Essaouira's ramparts, explained
An 18th-century sea wall built by a French military architect for a Moroccan sultan, its cannons still in place, that went on to appear in a Cannes-winning Orson Welles film and a season of Game of Thrones.
See Essaouira day trip tickets on GetYourGuide ↗Skala de la Ville at a glance
| Detail | |
|---|---|
| Built | 1760s, under Sultan Mohammed III |
| Architect | Théodore Cornut, French military engineer |
| What it is | A cannon-lined sea-wall gun platform and walkway |
| Film history | Orson Welles' Othello (1951); Game of Thrones' Astapor (Season 3) |
| UNESCO status | Part of the Medina of Essaouira, inscribed 2001 |
A fortress built by a European engineer, for a Moroccan sultan
Essaouira was founded in 1764 by Sultan Mohammed III (Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah), who wanted a new Atlantic trading port to replace the older harbour further south. He brought in Théodore Cornut, a French mathematician and military architect based in Gibraltar, to design and build it — which is why the town's walls and grid street plan read as closer to a French fortified port like Saint-Malo than to any older Moroccan medina. UNESCO's own listing describes the result as a late-18th-century fortified town transferred, more or less intact in its design principles, onto the North African coast.
Skala de la Ville, the sea wall you actually walk
Skala de la Ville is the town's northern sea rampart: a raised gun platform and walkway running along the top of the sea wall, built as part of Cornut's original fortification and still carrying real 18th-century cannons along the walk today. It was built to defend the harbour and the town behind it, and the crenellated stretches between the cannon positions give unobstructed views straight out over the Atlantic — which is exactly why it's the spot most visitors photograph first.
The wall Orson Welles filmed on
Between 1948 and 1951, Orson Welles shot his self-financed film of Othello in fits and starts across several countries, including scenes filmed in Mogador — Essaouira's name at the time. The finished film went on to share the Grand Prix, the award later renamed the Palme d'Or, at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival, giving this stretch of Moroccan coastline a genuine, decades-old place in film history well before it became a modern filming location again.
The wall that played Astapor
Skala de la Ville's ramparts were used as Astapor in an early season of Game of Thrones — the walk Daenerys Targaryen takes along the city walls was filmed on this exact stretch, with set dressing including crucifix bases built directly over the real 18th-century cannon mounts. It's a detail plenty of visitors only learn once they're standing on the wall themselves: the crenellations in front of you are the same stone the production dressed for Slaver's Bay.
Why the cannons are still there
Unlike many historic fortifications that have their armaments removed or replaced with replicas, Skala de la Ville's cannons remain mounted in their original positions along the walkway, part of what UNESCO's inscription protects as a genuinely intact piece of 18th-century military architecture rather than a restoration. Walking the wall today is as close as most visitors get to standing inside a working 18th-century coastal fortress anywhere on this stretch of the Atlantic.
Visiting it on this tour
The ramparts sit inside the free-time block of this day trip, an easy walk from where the coach usually sets the group down near the medina gates. There's no separate ticket or entry fee to walk the open sections of the wall; the walk itself takes as little as fifteen minutes end to end, though most visitors linger longer for the views and the photographs than the walking alone would need.