For half a year, the Moroccan coastal town swells in size for the Gnaoua festival and the summer holiday season, but what happens when the tourists head home?

The small Atlantic coastal community of Essaouira recently welcomed nearly a half-million Moroccan and international visitors for its annual Gnaoua World Music Festival, but 13 editions of the wildly popular event have brought more than just tourists.

The once sleepy town now faces both big-city prosperity and its accompanying problems.

"The music festival has changed the face of Essaouira," says economist Brahim Maghraoui.

Gnaoua is a mixture of sub-Saharan African, Berber and Arabic religious songs and rhythms. The June 24th-27th festival reflected Gnaoua's diverse roots, playing host to musicians from all over the world.

"Each year, we try to explore further and enrich cultural dialogue by inviting artists from a wide range of backgrounds," event director Neila Tazi tells Magharebia. The festival is famed for enabling home-grown maalems and international artists to collaborate on wholly new musical styles.

Organisers say that since the festival's first edition in 1998, Essaouira has represented Morocco as a place of friendliness, tolerance, freedom, and creativity where civilisations may meet.

But the Gnaoua it celebrates grew out of the slave trade that brought thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans to the Maghreb.

"When Moroccans think of Gnaoua they think of Essaouira, not of history, of slavery, of marginalisation," says Rod Solaimani, who was present at the event.

"This is a commercialised form of Gnaoua, and the audience often misses out on the history," Solaimani tells us. As an example, he points to the festival's official website, where they sell key chains with dangling krakebs.

The traditional Gnaoua castanet-like instruments are meant to simulate the sound of shackled feet.

"Gnaoua can't be authentic and survive," says Alae Lahlou, a Moroccan earning a degree in event marketing and management in London.

"If you want to keep the old stuff, you've got to add something new, mix it up with the trends," he says, explaining that this year, the spotlight was on a fusion of Gnaoua music with international styles.

Lahlou came to the festival in Essaouira to help organisers make the event more "customer-orientated". Or, as he puts it, to ensure that tourists get what they want. In the future, he says, the festival will probably move even further away from traditional Gnaoua music, as most tourists "don't really know what Gnaoua is."

Mustapha Toufik, a volleyball player for the Rabat and Morocco teams, says he knows what authentic Gnaoua music is, but loves the new style as well. "Before, it was just the hajhouj and krakebs. It was always the same style. Now, you see something new every time." Still, he adds, traditional Gnaoua music will never go away.

"Gnaoua is in our culture. The day we're born, the first thing we hear is Gnaoua. We grow up with it."

Toufik, who has come to the festival in Essaouira every year since 2006, is amazed by the increase in development.

"There are new houses and hotels everywhere," he tells Magharebia. "Just in the past year, the number of buildings in the neighbourhood where I rent an apartment has doubled."

Back in 1998, Essaouira was a small coastal town known for fish and wooden handicrafts carved from thuya trees. There were nine lodging establishments, seven restaurants and 17 cafes.

Then came the music festival and several hundred thousand holiday-makers.

There are now at least 150 riads, hotels and guesthouses, 60 restaurants and countless cafes. Highway construction is under way to link Marrakech and Essaouira. Growth has been so rapid that the government is now creating a green belt around the city to stop expansion inland.

It is not just owners of businesses who benefit from the increased activity. Even people on limited incomes eagerly await the gathering, so that they can rent their homes to visitors.

Saadia El Hajja, a mother of four, says the event helps her family save up enough money to keep them going for the rest of the year. Especially since her fisherman husband struggles to find ways to supplement his income.

"Many Moroccans and foreigners go on vacation to attend the festival. For two weeks, local families receive constant demand from visitors from within Morocco and elsewhere," she says with a broad smile. She rents out two rooms in her flat for 200 dirhams a day.

Safae, a young public-sector worker from Rabat, spends her annual vacation in Essaouira. She and her friends Meriem and Khadija always rent the same apartment for 500 dirhams a day.

"I find Gnaoua music fascinating. The festival, which attracts a constellation of artists, is really an occasion not to be missed," she says.

While some Essaouira residents have benefitted from festival-generated tourism by letting their flats or operating seasonal businesses, the economic bounty has not been evenly spread.

Some locals complain that foreigners are buying up the old houses in the medina. Others gripe that tourism establishments are importing workers from Casablanca and Marrakech instead of hiring native Essaouirans.

And while Essaouira was declared a "city without slums" in 2008 under the government's slum-eradication programme, unpaved, run-down sections remain on its outskirts.

"They've only developed the surface of the city," says London-based festival promoter Lahlou. He says that tourism-generated expansion has helped alleviate poverty for many locals, but the remaining unemployment, coupled with the high number of outside visitors, has turned the festival into a hub for drug use. It's a problem that organisers must constantly address.

Starting in 2009, Essaouira banned the sale of alcohol during the festival, except in restaurants and hotels. In another security crackdown on potential substance abuse, gendarmes moved amid 30,000 people at the Maâlem Mahmoud Guinéa concert on June 26th. Officers filtered through the crowd, smelling water bottles for alcohol and searching backpacks.

The city is still trying to adjust to all the changes wrought by the festival.

"Before the first festival the city was smaller, but after the first three, it's become a star city," Abdelali Lahrech, a mechanic for fishing ships in the port, tells Magharebia.

Essaouira's heightened image has led to increased tourism throughout the summer and brought new industries to the city, including kite surfing, Lahrech says. "For six months, it's vibrant; for six months, it sleeps," he adds.

And as the seasonal tourist influx ends, poverty resurfaces.

Every day at five or six o'clock, he says that women from poor families come to the docks to beg for whatever fish is leftover from the day's catch.

"Many people have gotten jobs from the increase in tourism in this city, but it's a few weeks a year. That's not a life."

By Anouar Hamama and Siham Ali for Magharebia in Essaouira - Magharebia.com