Beautiful field of saffron crocus just before the harvest

Saffron is an extremely important and prized spice within Moroccan culture. It’s used primarily as a spice with a complex and slightly sweet flavor, and imparts the food it spices with a brilliant yellow color. It’s also used in dyes, tea, perfumes, and medicines. Studies suggest that it could help to suppress cancer, have antioxidant-like properties, and may even help with depression.

The red threads you see when you buy saffron are in fact the stigmas of a purple flower, the saffron crocus. The flowers must be gathered by hand and the stigmas must be separated from the flower by hand. One kilogram of saffron requires the harvest of 110,000–170,000 flowers; forty hours of labor are required to pick 150,000 flowers. Knowing this, it is easy to see why saffron is by far the most expensive spice in the world.

A handful of Moroccan saffron crocus flowers

In Morocco, most saffron is grown in Taliouine village, in the Souktana cooperative. The flowers bloom in October and early November, and the crop is cultivated in traditional ways, with natural fertilizers and manual plowing. It’s best to buy saffron in the whole stigma, rather than the powder, because saffron is often fraudulent. The strands should be long and thin with a dark red color. The smell should be strong, and the strands should stain your finger when you pinch them.

Some key facts: Morocco is the world’s 4th largest producer of Saffron, after Iran, India, and Greece.  Morocco produces just 3,000 kg of saffron per year.  That small amount, however, is enough to employ 1,285 farmers and support the village of Taliouine and its 12,000 inhabitants. Today, Moroccans Saffron has achieved status as a Product Designation of Origin for its unique qualities, which helps farmers achieve a fair price for it.

Harvesting the saffron threads by hand in Morocco

Once you have the prized spice in hand, join our cooking classes to learn all the delicious ways you can use it!

Marrakech medina and Koutoubia by Winston Churchill

The sun is brilliant but not scorching; the air crisp, bracing but without being chilly; the days bright, the nights cool and fresh.” During his visits he often stayed in the luxurious La Mamounia, and was inspired to paint quite a few scenes from the city.

During World War II, after the Casablanca conference, Churchill talked President Roosevelt into visiting Marrakech with him, saying, “You cannot come all this way to North Africa without seeing Marrakech. Let us spend two days there. I must be with you when you see the sun set on the Atlas Mountains.”  While here, the two great men stayed in the Villa Taylor; the legend goes that the owner, Mrs. Taylor, was such a stalwart Republican that she sold the villa after the war because she couldn’t bear the thought that a Democratic president had slept in her bed.

Churchill insisted they admire the view from the tower of the villa, so two of Roosevelt’s staffers carried the crippled president up the winding stairs to join the prime minister.

Marrakech medina with the Atlas Mountains in the background

Lounging on the roof Roosevelt said he felt like a sultan. Churchill’s doctor, who was there with them, wrote of the evening in his diary: “As we stood gazing at the purple hills, where the light was changing every minute, the PM murmured, ‘it’s the most lovely spot in the world’.”

This trip was the one and only time during World War II that Churchill – an avid painter – took up his brushes: to paint the view from the villa that he had shared with Roosevelt that night.

Churchills love affair with Marrakech seen through his paintings

Churchill’s granddaughter, Celia Sandys, writes about her travels in her grandfather’s footsteps in her book Chasing Churchill, from which most of the information in this post was gleaned.

While you can never promise someone 100% safety, it is still true here as everywhere that you must be aware of your surroundings.  That said, crime, street trouble, unrest, are comparatively low here compared to most places in the world, even Europe or the United States.  Crime statistics show that incidents of violent crime are substantially lower here in Marrakech than they are in almost every major European or US city.

Of course there was a bomb here recently.  It’s important to put this in context and to see it for what it was, not some vast conspiracy.  This was an incident of a young man “going postal” as we have seen happen in the US in Oklahoma, in South Dakota, at Columbine High School, at the University of Texas, at the shooting of a Congresswoman.  We have seen this same phenomenon in the UK on several occasions, and most recently, and horribly in Norway.  We sometimes get seduced into wondering what their reasons were for doing such a thing, but the common thread is that people disconnect from society and have some horrible grudge, and end up taking it out on innocent people in the most horrific ways.

The British Ambassador to Morocco recently pointed out that the Foreign Office’s current terrorist threat assessment level for any part of Morocco is lower than that for any of the following cities: London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, New York…that means you are safer here.  The thing is when something happens in a place like Morocco, it resonates more loudly than it does in Europe because there is a lot more going on in those places that drown out the noise.

The most important thing that we can all do in our lives is to go about our lives as we always have, to try to live peacefully and freely, and not in fear.  If we change our ways, accept a loss of freedom, live in fear, then we have given those who speak the language of violence the ultimate victory.  We must all keep calm and carry on.

There were some demonstrations during the start of the “Arab Spring” but they were mostly peaceful with a few small exceptions–it only ever takes one bad apple to break a window…None of these demonstrations, however, had any direct impact on tourists, and were largely confined to areas that tourists are unlikely to go to: outside administrative offices, in front of City Hall, that sort of thing.

Since the vote in July and the intended opening up of the political landscape, Morocco has once again demonstrated that it is ahead of the curve in terms of modernising and working towards a stable and broad-based democracy–a process that has now been going on since King Mohamed the VI rose to the throne.

We believe it is safe here and that it is a wonderful country.  The Moroccan people are some of the most engaging, welcoming, and friendly people you are ever likely to meet.  They are full of mirth and wonderful surprises.  Let that be the reason you come here, and park everything else behind.

If you are excited by the political winds of change that are blowing through many, many countries today, all the way around the Mediterranean, down into Africa, and east all the way to China, then there is no better place to live it than right here.  Morocco is a safe and stable country that is changing at a responsible pace; what better way to watch history unfold than to be here and to be a part of the Moroccan Spring…see you here soon.