Essaouira is an excep­tion­al exam­ple of a late-18th-cen­­tu­ry for­ti­fied town, built accord­ing to the prin­ci­ples of con­tem­po­rary Euro­pean mil­i­tary archi­tec­ture in a North African con­text. Since its foun­da­tion, it has been a major inter­na­tion­al trad­ing sea­port, link­ing Moroc­co and its Saha­ran hin­ter­land with Europe and the rest of the world.