Safi Pottery Hill

The Colline des Potiers rises immediately outside the Safi medina and is one of the largest working pottery quarters in Morocco - dozens of workshops on the slope, throwing on wheels, drying pieces in the yards, painting in cobalt and polychrome, and firing in tall cone-shaped kilns stoked with wood, so the hill smokes. Safi's ware is the blue-and-white and the polychrome tableware sold across the country, along with tagines, tiles and larger pieces, and the trade goes back at least to the sixteenth century with a boost from potters who arrived from Fes in the nineteenth. You can walk among the kilns and into workshops, watch the whole sequence, and buy from the makers at a fraction of shop prices. A national ceramics museum sits in the Kechla fortress above. It is dusty and smoky and is a production zone, not an attraction.

What you actually see

• Cone kilns firing - wood-stoked, smoking, on a hillside of dozens of workshops.
• The full sequence - throwing, drying, painting and firing all visible in one walk.
• Safi blue-and-white - the cobalt tableware sold across Morocco.
• Direct prices - buying from the maker rather than through a shop.

When to go

Spring and autumn; weekday mornings when the kilns are going. Two to three hours.

Honest expectations

It is a working industrial quarter - dusty, smoky and unglamorous. Guides attach themselves and steer to particular shops for commission. Large pieces are hard to carry home. Wood-fired kilns produce genuinely unpleasant smoke.

Nearby

The Safi medina is below the hill; Dar el-Bahar is on the shore.