Gnawa Music Festival, Morocco

The Festival of Gnawa was inaugurated in 1998, as a free world music festival to celebrate Morocco’s ancestry of Gnawa music, and with the event growing each year since, it attracted an audience of 400,000 people from all over the world in 2007. For Essaouira, a city that mainly lives from tourism and its small fishing industry, it is the most important cultural event of the year, and turns the laid back town into a proverbial African Woodstock. Besides the numerous Moroccan maâllem, the undisputed masters of Gnawa music, many other musicians hailing from the jazz and rock genres are performing there.