The clay that built a city

If Safi became Morocco's city of pottery, it wasn't because of some event decided on a particular day of history: it's because the earth bordering the city gave potters an abundant, good-quality clay, within easy reach, and around that deposit a whole district formed over time, devoted to throwing and firing. It's the material, not a date, that explains the city — and it's this district, known today as the Potters' Hill, that still carries the craft. Understanding Safi through its clay rather than through a convenient legend also changes how one visits it: you go there less to check a number than to watch a gesture.

The clay

The whole geography of the craft in Safi starts from the same observation, noted by Wikipedia's own article on the city's pottery: "rich in raw material, Safi became prized for the quality and abundance of its clay." A port city, open to the Atlantic, thus doubled as a land-based production center — the sea for trade, the earth for material. It is no accident that the potters' quarter settled in one single spot rather than spreading across the city: a pottery workshop is built around its clay source, not the other way round. The clay is worked on site, shaped on site, fired on site — and what began as simple practical access to a local resource became, over generations, first a neighbourhood identity, then a city's identity.

This very concrete logic — settling where the raw material is good and abundant, rather than bringing it in from afar — is the same one that explains most of the world's great pottery centres, from Tuscany to Andalusia: the craft follows geology before it follows fashion. In Safi, it produced a recognisable urban landscape, where the very name of the district — the Potters' Hill — recalls that the city was built around this deposit rather than the other way round. One does not visit this hill as one would visit a monument finished once and for all: workshops there still draw, today, on the same clay as their predecessors.

The gesture

Wheel-throwing remains the craft's central gesture: a lump of clay set on a turning wheel, shaped first by hand and then refined with simple tools, until it takes the desired form — plate, jar, tagine, vase. The piece then dries slowly, in the open air or in the shade depending on the season, before a first firing solidifies it; only after this stage does the decoration — often hand-painted, before glazing — dress the still-porous surface. Then comes the firing that fixes the glaze, the step that turns still-fragile clay into durable ceramic, and this is where the gesture becomes a matter of the kiln too: on the Potters' Hill, the oldest workshops still fire with wood, in brick kilns, a slower and less predictable technique than electric or gas firing, but the one that gives the pieces their deepest colours. Safi's glazes, in particular the greens and turquoise blues applied over the local red clay, have become the city's visual signature — recognisable at a glance, distinct from Fez's blues or the ochres of the south. It is this pairing of red clay and a green or turquoise glaze, revealed through carefully controlled firing, that gives Safi pottery its identity — more than a date or a number, a combination of material, gesture and fire. Nothing in this process is instantaneous: each piece takes several days between throwing and coming out of the kiln, and it is this slowness, more than any mythical origin, that explains why the know-how is so hard to pass on outside a workshop.

The place

The district itself carries a name that tells its own history: Potters' Quarter, or Potters' Hill, depending on whether one speaks of it as an address or as a landmark. Both refer to the same place, where workshops, kilns and potters' homes have clustered over time — to the point that this area has been classified a historic monument since 1920, a classification that protects less a single building than a collective way of life organised around one shared craft. Recognition of the place as heritage did not stop there: Safi pottery is today among the craft sectors Morocco has shortlisted as a candidate for geographical-indication status — a legal mechanism that formally protects a product because of its origin, much as certain cheeses or wines are protected elsewhere in the world, under a craft-labelling strategy carried jointly by the ministry in charge of Handicrafts and Morocco's Industrial and Commercial Property Office. A geographical indication does not reward an old know-how in itself: it establishes that a particular quality or reputation still holds, today, to this specific place — it is the Hill itself, not a founding date, that this mechanism recognises.

This dependence of the craft on a place and on official recognition is nothing new in the history of Moroccan craftsmanship: research into the social status of potters in pre-colonial society shows that a craftsman, whatever his skill, remained largely tied to the ruling power — the Almohads, for instance, broadly referred to craftspeople as "servants of the State." Today's potter, working in a family workshop or a cooperative on the Hill, operates in a far more autonomous setting; but he remains the heir of a craft that has always had to negotiate with the institutions of its time in order to exist and to be passed on.

Another, better-dated event changed the district's shape at the turn of the twentieth century: the arrival in Safi of the ceramicist Boujemâa Lamali, who founded a pottery school there, supported by the colonial administration. Lamali did not invent pottery in Safi — the clay and the potters' quarter existed before him — but he structured its transmission, trained generations of craftspeople and left a lasting mark on the local aesthetic. It is partly thanks to that legacy that the city today houses a national ceramics museum, opened in 1990 inside the former Portuguese kasbah and taken over since 2018 by the National Foundation of Museums — a place that documents this history rather than telling it through a convenient legend.

Who throws today

The craft is still largely passed down within families, from one thrower to the next, in workshops clustered on the Potters' Hill, where inherited practice and more recent tools coexist. Some potters work alone, others in cooperatives, splitting throwing, decorating and firing between several hands — a division of labour found in most Moroccan pottery centres, one that Safi still practises concentrated within a single district, the Potters' Hill, rather than scattered across the city. It is not a number that makes the district's vitality, but the continuity of a gesture still passing from one generation of potters to the next. What the geographical indication ultimately seeks to protect is precisely this continuity — the still-active presence of workshops that throw, decorate and fire through the same steps as yesterday, rather than a know-how frozen inside a museum.

Where to try it

The national ceramics museum, set facing the ocean inside the former kasbah, remains the safest starting point for understanding this history before heading down to the workshops themselves — its pieces document the craft's evolution rather than its legend. To come home with a piece, or simply watch a potter at the wheel, that happens on the Potters' Hill itself, workshop by workshop: there you can follow the gesture from the still-damp lump of clay to the glazed piece, with no step needing to be re-enacted for visitors — it is a district that works, not a stage replaying it.

Safi does not yet have a workshop listed in Tazuri's directory — the city is not among those currently covered. But the craft of pottery is already there: the directory of pottery workshops lists workshops practising this same gesture — clay, throwing, firing — elsewhere in Morocco, until a Safi workshop finds its place there too.