Gnaoua and World Music Festival

The music of the Gnawa

Gnawa is a set of musical events, performances, fraternal practices and healing rituals that mix the sacred and the secular. It is above all the music of a Sufi brotherhood, with lyrics of mostly religious content that invoke ancestors and spirits. The practice goes back at least to the sixteenth century, to people brought to Morocco through slavery and the slave trade, and is today recognised as part of Morocco’s many-sided culture and identity.

In the cities, Gnawa groups hold all-night rituals of rhythm and trance that combine ancestral African practices, Arab-Muslim influences and Amazigh performance. In the countryside they offer communal meals to marabout saints. Urban musicians play a stringed instrument and castanets in colourful embroidered costumes; rural groups use large drums and castanets and dress in white. Gnawa was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List in 2019.

A festival on the Atlantic

The Gnaoua and World Music Festival brings this tradition to the stages of Essaouira, a port city founded in the eighteenth century at the crossing of trade, spiritual and human routes. Its maâlems, master Gnaoua musicians, perform alongside artists from across Africa and the world, and the festival is known for fusions in which the languages of different musics meet.

Around the concerts, the festival holds a human rights forum and, with Berklee College of Music, a programme that brings together young musicians from Morocco, Africa and beyond. In 2026 it reached its 27th edition.