Water Sellers

Oh, the thirst, the thirst. Under the hot sun of Place Jema el Fnaa, both tourists and locals battle dehydration. We’re probably each consuming 4 liters of water a day, and in the heat, it’s still not enough.

Wandering the Place, you’ll frequently come upon men dressed in red with colorful pitched hats ringing bells and carrying large goatskin sacks. We’ve tended to give them a wide berth as they are always asking tourists for money to pose for photos. Their attire marks them as Berbers, and we look at them as some sort of vestigial organ like the London Guards in their Beefeater hats.


These men are water sellers. They’re licensed by the state, and their numbers are thus kept in check. If we went out and bought ourselves red outfits and fancy hats, the police would quickly escorts us away from the Place. Often they’re fathers and sons, and operating in small groups they pool the tips they receive during the day and divvy them up each night.



At first this relic from the past struck us a little sad, but over time, we’ve found that a good many locals do indeed buy cups of water from them, though Hamoud estimates that they might earn 100 dirhams a day from tourists while only 50 dirhams from selling water to the locals. The Moroccan habit of communal water cups is at its most acute here; the water sellers’ form-follows-function outfits include a selection of drinking vessels attached to their chests. For thirsty customers, a measure of water is poured from the industrial-sized canteen into a brass or tin cup. Of course, when once these water sellers had to trek their water in from far away, they now go to the ice seller and stuff their bags with chips of his ice.





For foreigners, of course, the unsung heroes of the water delivery business look a lot less flashy. Though they bring water in plastic bottles, they still deliver it by hand across the city. And while aside from us, there are precious few tourists chronicling their activity, we’re all drinking their water.