Essaouira is a port city with about 85,000 inhabitants on the Moroccan Atlantic coast in the province of the same name in the Marrakech-Safi region. Before the independence of Morocco, the city was also called Mogador. This name probably goes back to the Portuguese and is used today only for the offshore island. The entire old town (Medina) of Essaouira was recognized in 2001 by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.