Surf & kite

Kitesurfing in Essaouira: Seasons, Spots and Your First Lesson

Written by the Chill Art Hostel team · updated 31 August 2026 · 9 min read

Essaouira turns up on every list of the world's windy towns, and the reputation is earned: the bay fills with kites most summer afternoons and the beach is lined with schools. But windy is not the same thing as good for your first lesson, and the gap between the bay and the spots up the coast is the gap between a great week and a frustrating one. Here is what a kite trip here actually looks like, from people who watch that bay from a rooftop every evening.

1. Why the bay of Essaouira is a beginner's spot, not a hero's spot

The Atlantic trade winds, the alizés, run down this coast and funnel straight into the bay. Two things then make that bay unusually forgiving for learning. It is a wide, shallow, sandy crescent with no reef and no rocks to get washed onto. And the wind arrives side-onshore, which means a beginner who loses control of the kite drifts back toward the beach instead of out to sea. That is the whole reason the schools set up here rather than at the more famous, more photogenic spots north of town.

The flip side is that the bay is flat, busy and unspectacular. Riders who already know what they are doing get bored of it in two days and start asking about Moulay Bouzerktoun. If you are booking a trip specifically to ride waves on a kite, the bay is your warm-up, not your destination.

2. The wind calendar: when to come for what

Essaouira has wind most of the year, which is exactly why people get the season wrong. The question is not whether it blows, it is how hard, how consistently, and what the water is doing underneath it.

3. The three spots, and who each one is for

Almost everything written about kiting here collapses into one word, Essaouira, when there are really three separate places along about 50 km of coast.

The practical consequence: ask any school or hostel who moves you between them. On a week where the bay is too light or too crowded, the good session may be half an hour up the coast, and whether that transport is included or improvised on the morning changes your trip.

4. What a first kite week actually looks like

Kitesurfing has a longer runway than surfing. Nobody rides on day one, and any school that tells you otherwise is selling. A realistic progression on the bay, assuming wind cooperates:

1. Day 1: the kite on land. Setup, safety systems, the wind window, self rescue. You will spend more of this day holding a bar on the sand than you expected, and it is the day that decides whether the rest goes well.
2. Day 2: body dragging. In the water, no board, learning to steer the kite and let it pull you. Unglamorous, and the single most useful skill you will learn, because it is how you retrieve a lost board for the rest of your life.
3. Day 3: first water starts. Board on, most attempts fail, one or two work. This is the day people either fall in love with the sport or decide it is not for them.
4. Day 4: riding, badly, downwind. You will get up and go, and you will end up 300 m down the beach walking back. Everybody does.
5. Day 5 onward: staying upwind. The real goal of a first week. Once you can come back to where you started, you are independent, and the sport opens up.

Two things break that timeline: no wind, and too much wind. Both happen. Build a week that has something else in it, because a kite trip with three blown-out days and no plan B is a bad holiday.

5. What it costs, and why kite costs more than surf

Kite is the most expensive way to get into the water anywhere in Morocco, and the reason is simply the gear. A surf lesson needs a foam board and a wetsuit. A kite lesson needs a kite, a bar, lines, a harness, a board, a wetsuit, a radio helmet on some schools, and an instructor who can only watch one or two people at a time. That ratio is the cost.

Our own packages bundle the bed and the activity so there is one number instead of three separate purchases. One activity per day: two nights means two activities, three nights means three. Solo is a bed in a dorm and the price is per person; duo is a private room and the price shown is the total for two people. Taxes included.

Equipment is included in the lessons. Packages are arranged on WhatsApp rather than through a form, because dates, level and room type are a two-minute conversation and a bad guess in a booking engine costs you a day.

6. Kitesurf or wingfoil: which one should you start with?

Wingfoil has taken over a visible share of the bay in the last few seasons, and beginners now genuinely have to choose. The honest comparison:

• Wingfoil is easier to start, harder to master. The wing is small, there are no lines to tangle, and a bad moment means you drop it and float. Getting onto the foil, though, takes longer than getting onto a kiteboard.
• Kitesurf gets you riding sooner. Most people are moving across the water by day 3 or 4. But the kite is a powerful object with lines, and the safety learning curve is real.
• Wingfoil works in lighter wind. On a soft day the wingers are out and the kites are on the beach. In a place with as much wind as this, that matters less than it does at home.

If you have one week and you want to be riding at the end of it, take kite. If you are building a sport for the next ten years and you are patient, look hard at wing.

7. Practicalities: staying in the medina, kiting in the bay

You do not need to sleep on the sand. The bay is a short walk from inside the walls, and the walk is the good part: you go through a waking 18th century port town on the way to the water and come back through the fish grills on the way home. What you do need is somewhere that works around the sport. Reception open at any hour, because sessions and arrivals do not respect office hours. A kitchen, because two weeks of restaurants is the hidden cost of a long trip. Somewhere to leave things securely while you are in the water. And something to do on a blown-out day: a cooking class, a hammam, a horse on the beach at Sidi Kaouki.

That last one is the part people underestimate. Every kiter has a week where the forecast lies. What decides whether it was a good trip is what was available on those afternoons. Ours tend to end the same way regardless: on the rooftop, 360 degrees of medina and ocean, comparing notes with people who were out in the same wind.

If you already know your dates, live availability for the eight rooms is on our direct booking page. If you want to talk through the season first, WhatsApp is faster than email.