Visibly, Essaouira does not stop collecting ecological crimes. First, the forest was massacred, the ecosystem of Mogador was destabilised, and the silting up of a large part of the city was caused. Then, they began to raze the phenomenal dunes that contain a unique biodiversity to give way to cement and concrete, and thus sacrifice several tens of years of efforts provided by the engineers and agents of the Water and Forests service who proceeded to fix the dunes thanks to the branching technique which allowed the stabilisation of a dune zone constituting a security belt ensuring the sustainability of a civilisation threatened by desertification. Today, we are witnessing a new scandal, a horror even: the mouth of Oued L’ksob, a Ramsar-listed ecological heritage site, has been transformed into an open sewer and a rubble dump.

"It's scandalous, the polluted water coming from El Ghazoua is pouring into the mouth of Oued L’ksob, even though there are young people and children who spend several hours there, and families who still depend on it!", indignantly says a French resident.

The images speak for themselves, a new ecological crime is taking place on a site supposed to enjoy special interest from decision-makers and local actors.

But where does the wastewater come from?

At the level of municipal services, the Essaouira-El Jadida real estate project is suspected of being responsible, given that it is not yet connected to the public liquid sanitation network. According to their version, once the septic tanks are saturated, they begin to release the polluted water towards the mouth of Oued L’ksob.

"It's a problem that goes back two years now, we had drawn up a detailed report defining the responsibilities. Chaabi Lil Iskane had committed to stopping the discharge of wastewater into the Oued while starting the work of building a treatment plant at the level of Essaouira-El Jadida. Unfortunately, it is starting again!", a concordant source affirmed to us.

Contacted by "Libé", Chaabi Lil Iskane denied these remarks, which it considers unfounded. According to the version of the real estate operator, the liquid sanitation at the level of Essaouira-El Jadida is functioning normally through two septic tanks that do not suffer from any leaks and are under the control of the National Office for Potable Water. This problem, specifies an official representing the operator, was to be debated during two meetings organised by the Caid of El Ghazoua, to which Chaabi Lil Iskane had responded present, while other stakeholders had shone by their absence. On the other hand, the operator assures that the work of building the treatment plant has already begun to definitively solve this problem. Information confirmed by local authorities who assure that the work has already reached one kilometre of drilling, while assuring that a multi-party commission will carry out a visit to the site next week to define the origin of the problem. In addition to this problem, we raised another practice that is just as scandalous: hundreds of tonnes of rubble dumped on the edges of the Oued, thus demolishing an entire biodiversity and harming an extraordinary natural landscape. Contacted by "Libé", the local authorities affirmed that it is a practice perpetrated at night by truck drivers who choose this zone for reasons of proximity, even though there is an authorised rubble dump managed according to standards at the level of Douar Laareb. They affirm that their efforts have not yet allowed the eradication of this illegal practice, which requires the mobilisation of human and logistical resources day and night. On the road connecting Essaouira to Ghazoua, one can read signs encouraging citizens to refrain from dumping their rubble in the forest or the mouth of the Oued, a means of awareness that is far from bearing fruit since this image of desolation is concretised on a daily basis by greedy and unscrupulous truckers. What will become of Essaouira after twenty years if we continue to treat its heritage in this way? No aspect of its legacy is currently spared, including the architectural heritage massacred on a daily basis by its own people!