Reported by Al Jazeera
For many, the search is driven less by profit than by the thrill of an unexpected discovery.
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.
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“The excitement comes partly from not knowing what lies beneath the sand,” he told Al Jazeera English.
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.
“It’s a nice hobby because it’s the kind of exploration where I find something and learn something new,” he said. “Each outing is a chance to encounter something I would otherwise never have known about.”
That curiosity has led him to old coins, including some associated with historical periods and places such as the Al Haouz region and Fez.
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.
“I just collect them as a memory,” he said with a glint in his eye.
In the same area, he once found what he thought was a…