Agadir, Morocco – Mustapha Harmouch moves slowly across the sand at Agadir’s Corniche, sweeping his metal detector in low, even arcs. He tunes out the surfers paddling beyond the shore, the children shrieking in the waves and the chatter of families, all his attention is on one sound: the beep that means the coil has passed over something buried beneath the sand. For the 33-year-old content creator, that uncertainty is the whole appeal.
The detector does not distinguish between treasure and rubbish, it gives the same signal whether the object below is a coin, a ring, a discarded piece of aluminium, or an old piece of fishing equipment. Harmouch bought a Tianxun TX 850 metal detector online about four years ago. What began as a hobby has since become an occasional part of the videos he posts on Stofishing, a YouTube travel and spearfishing channel with roughly 123,000 subscribers.
In the coastal town of Sidi Ouassay, about 65km south of Agadir, he says he found one of his rarest hauls: 14 Moroccan falus, old bronze or copper coins, in a single spot. Some were too damaged by salt and the passage of time for their markings to be easily read, but Harmouch says the oldest dates to 1289 on the Hijri calendar. For Harmouch, the coins’ value lies less in their price than in what they reveal about the past.
In the same area, he once found what he thought was a meteorite, only to learn it was a common, inexpensive mineral. That sense of possibility and adventure is what keeps him returning to the beaches around Agadir. Harmouch goes detecting about four times a month, often with fellow members of the Moroccan Association for Research and Exploration Enthusiasts.
He favours Taghazout and Agadir’s Corniche, where there is less rubbish for his detector to pick up. The beaches have yielded jewellery, Moroccan coins and foreign currency, including a French 20-franc silver coin. The possibility of finding something valuable is still part of the appeal.
He once found a small gold ring in Taghazout. Morocco’s main legal framework for protecting historical monuments, archaeological sites, works of art and antiquities dates to Law 22-80, which regulates archaeological prospecting and the treatment of historical discoveries. The government has reiterated that unauthorised archaeological searches on land or at sea are prohibited.
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