Three days in Casablanca: the city Morocco works in, and the mosque it built out over the sea

Two nights for the great mosque on the Atlantic, the art deco boulevards the French left behind, and the Habous quarter

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Casablanca
Places
7 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Casablanca is where Morocco goes to work. Four million people, the container port, the banks, the head offices and the traffic to match, and a medina so modest that guidebooks tend to apologise for it. Most visitors land at the airport and take the first train to Marrakech or Rabat, and for a first trip to the country that is not a mad decision.

What stops it being the right one is a single building. The Hassan II Mosque was finished in 1993 on a promontory jutting into the Atlantic, and it is enormous in a way photographs flatten: a 210 metre minaret, a hall for twenty five thousand people, a roof that opens, and a floor partly glazed so that the sea is visible under your feet. It is also one of very few mosques in Morocco that non-Muslims may go inside, which makes it the only chance most visitors get to see how the interiors they are shut out of everywhere else actually look.

The rest of the city rewards a lower-key kind of attention. The French built a whole downtown here between the wars and much of the art deco is still standing, shabby and lived in rather than restored. There is a quarter of the city built in the 1930s to look like a medina and rather good at it. And the country's Jewish history, almost invisible elsewhere, has a museum here. Two nights is the right length: enough to see all of that, short enough that nobody feels stuck.

Highlights

  • The Hassan II Mosque, the one great Moroccan interior a non-Muslim is allowed to walk into
  • Boulevard Mohammed V, block after block of 1930s facades nobody has tidied up
  • The Habous quarter, a medina designed by French architects and now a proper working one
  • The Museum of Moroccan Judaism, small, quiet, and the only one of its kind in the Arab world
  • The shrine of Sidi Abderrahman on its rock, cut off from the beach at every high tide
  • A city that is not performing for you, which after Marrakech is a genuine relief

Where to stay

Casablanca

The shape of the city is easy. The old medina and the port sit at the north end, with the mosque a kilometre west of them on the water. South of the medina is the French downtown, a grid of boulevards laid out from 1912 onwards and filled with the best colonial architecture in Morocco. Further south again are the Habous quarter and the residential districts, and west along the shore runs the corniche.

The history explains why it looks the way it does. There was a port here called Anfa long before there was a Casablanca; the Portuguese wrecked it, rebuilt it, named it Casa Branca and walked away after the earthquake of 1755. The French arrived in 1907 and spent forty years building a modern city beside the small one, which is why Morocco's biggest city has almost no old town and an enormous amount of 1930s concrete.

It is not a beautiful place and it does not pretend to be. What it has is scale, an unpolished ordinary life that no other Moroccan city on the tourist route still shows you, and the mosque.

Day by day

Day 1 in Casablanca

The old medina, the boulevards and dinner in the fake Rick's

Land, get into town, and spend what is left of the day on foot in the north of the city, which is where the two oldest layers sit next to each other.

The old medina takes an hour and no more. It is small, plain and working, with hardware, cheap clothes and food rather than crafts, and it is emphatically not Fez. That is exactly why it is worth the walk: nobody is selling you anything, the lanes are ordinary, and it is one of the few medinas in Morocco where a visitor is simply not interesting.

Then out of the walls and south into the French city. Boulevard Mohammed V and the streets either side of it run block after block of 1920s and 1930s facades, all curved balconies, ironwork and cinema fronts, most of it grubby and inhabited rather than restored. The Central Post Office of 1918 is the easiest place to start looking, with its arcaded front and mosaic panels, and once you have your eye in you will not stop seeing them.

Dinner, on your first night, at the bar that trades on the film. Be clear about what it is: the 1942 picture was shot entirely on sound stages in California and never came near Morocco, and the place that now serves you dinner opened sixty years later in an old medina courtyard house. The piano player really does play the song. The food is good and the bill is not small, and it is a much better evening if you go knowing all of that.

  1. 15:00

    Old Medina

    Landmark

    An hour, entering from the Place des Nations Unies side and coming out at the port. Small enough that getting lost costs ten minutes at worst.

  2. 16:45

    Central Post Office

    Architecture

    Look up at the facade and go inside for the tilework and the hall. Stamps are still sold at the counters, which is more than most 1918 post offices manage.

  3. 17:30

    Art deco walk down Boulevard Mohammed V

    Note

    Half an hour on foot from the post office towards Place Mohammed V, looking up the whole way. The old cinema fronts and the wilaya clock tower are the landmarks.

  4. 20:00

    Rick's Cafe

    Other

    Book ahead, and there is a dress code: no shorts. Upstairs for the view down over the room, downstairs to be near the piano.

With more time: The port end of the medina wall has an eighteenth-century bastion with cannons still pointing out to sea, now a walled garden restaurant, and it is a pleasant place to sit for a mint tea in the late afternoon whether or not you eat there.

Day 2 in Casablanca

The Hassan II Mosque, the corniche and the shrine on the rock

The whole day is on the Atlantic, working west from the mosque along the shore.

Take the first or second tour of the morning at the mosque. King Hassan II had it built by public subscription, the French architect Michel Pinseau designed it, and it went up in six years on land reclaimed from the sea so that worshippers would pray over the water. It works better than that sounds. The minaret is 210 metres and was the tallest in the world until Algiers built a taller one; the prayer hall holds twenty five thousand people under a cedar ceiling that slides open; and part of the floor is glass, with the Atlantic moving underneath it. There is a hammam the size of a swimming pool in the basement that has never been brought into use. Whatever you think of building it in a country that needed the money elsewhere, and Moroccans argue about that too, it is a masterpiece of craft: every square metre of the plaster, tile and cedar was cut by hand.

Lunch on the water afterwards, then the corniche. It is a faded seaside strip rather than a beauty spot: hotels from the sixties, nightclubs that have seen better decades, fast food, and a long line of cafes with terraces facing the ocean. Take one of the terraces, order a coffee and watch Casablanca do its weekend. This is where the city relaxes and it is the least touristic hour of the trip.

Keep going west, past the end of the built-up strip, to the shrine of Sidi Abderrahman. It sits on a rock just offshore, whitewashed, surrounded by a knot of small houses, and at high water the sea cuts it off entirely. Non-Muslims cannot go into the sanctuary but can walk the little village around it at low tide, and the walk along the sand towards it in the late afternoon is the point of the excursion.

  1. 09:00

    King Hassan II Mosque

    Religious

    Guided tours only, roughly hourly through the morning, about an hour long. Shoulders and knees covered, shoes carried through the hall, cameras allowed.

  2. 12:30

    Grilled fish by the water

    Eat

    Everything between the mosque and the corniche does the same lunch: whatever came in that morning, grilled, with bread and a chopped salad.

  3. 14:00

    The Corniche

    Visit

    Walk the boulevard rather than committing to one end of it, and take a table at whichever ocean terrace looks busiest with locals.

  4. 16:30

    Shrine of Sidi Abderrahman

    Visit

    Check the tide before going: the causeway is under water at high tide. The sanctuary itself is closed to non-Muslims, the lanes around it are not.

With more time: If the weather is against you, the same afternoon works indoors in the southern districts, where several private galleries show contemporary Moroccan art and charge nothing to walk in.

Day 3 in Casablanca

The Habous quarter and Moroccan Jewish history before the airport

Two things in the south of the city, both on the way to the airport road, and both easily done before an afternoon flight.

Habous is a quarter the French laid out in the 1930s as a new medina, with arcaded streets, courtyards, a bread market, and bookshops and pastry shops people cross the city for. That could have been a disaster and instead it is the most pleasant walking in the city. The Mahkama du Pacha stands at the edge of it, a courthouse and pasha's residence of more than sixty rooms with carved cedar ceilings, wrought iron and tiled floors throughout. Getting in has always been a matter of asking at the door and finding somebody to walk you round, often in French, and it is sometimes simply shut. Treat the building as a bonus and the quarter around it as the reason you came.

Then the Museum of Moroccan Judaism, the one place in the region where this history is collected and shown. Morocco had a Jewish population of a quarter of a million before the 1950s and has a few thousand now, and this quiet house in a residential street is where that history is kept: synagogue fittings, embroidered costume, silver and books, alongside a good collection of Berber jewellery and dress. It takes an hour and it is the thing people remember from a Casablanca stopover after the mosque.

It keeps weekday hours and closes at the weekend, so check before building a morning around it.

  1. 09:30

    Mahkama du Pacha

    Other

    Free but awkward: ask at the entrance and expect to be handed to a guide, or to be told no. A few words of French help more here than anywhere else in the city.

  2. 10:45

    Pastries and a wander in Habous

    Note

    The arcades around the market are where Casablanca buys its bread, its almond pastries and its books. Worth an unhurried hour.

  3. 12:00

    Museum of Moroccan Judaism

    Culture

    Weekdays only, about an hour, in a residential street in Oasis. Small, well labelled and unlike anything else in the country.

With more time: With longer before the flight, the national football stadium is a short taxi away and worth a look on a match day, when the whole southern half of the city turns green and red and audible from several streets off.

Before you go

Getting in

Mohammed V is the busiest airport in the country and almost every long-haul route into Morocco lands here. The useful thing to know is that it has its own railway station under the terminal: trains run about hourly, take around forty five minutes into the city and cost a small fraction of the fixed taxi fare, which is nearer three hundred dirham. Leave extra time in the other direction, because the security queue after the train is slow.

Two central stations matter. Casa Voyageurs is the main one and where the long-distance trains start, including the high-speed line to Tangier and the services to Marrakech and Fez. Casa Port is smaller, sits at the bottom of the downtown beside the harbour, and is the more convenient of the two if your hotel is central.

Rabat is under an hour away by train and Marrakech about three, which is why Casablanca works better as the start or end of a trip than as a place you make a detour for.

Getting around

The tram is clean, frequent and cheap, runs from early morning until half past ten at night and covers the line between the mosque, the downtown and the southern districts. Buy the rechargeable card at a machine, and bring coins because most machines take nothing else.

Petit taxis here are red, metered, and the fastest way to cover the distances the tram does not. Ask for the meter before setting off. Grand taxis are for the airport and out-of-town runs.

Downtown is walkable and pleasant to walk, laid out on French boulevards with signs on them. The old medina is small enough that no matter how lost you get you are ten minutes from an exit.

Visiting the mosque

You can only go in on a guided tour, which runs several times a day in a handful of languages and takes about an hour. Tickets are bought at the entrance on the north side, tours pause around Friday prayers, and the schedule shifts in Ramadan.

Cover shoulders and knees, and expect to carry your shoes in a bag through the prayer hall. Photography is allowed inside, which is unusual and worth knowing.

Go in the morning if you can. The light through the eastern side of the hall is better and the tour groups are smaller, and it leaves the afternoon for the coast, which is a five minute taxi away.

Where to stay

Downtown, between the old medina and Place Mohammed V, puts you inside the art deco quarter and walking distance from Casa Port. It is noisy, central and where the cheaper hotels are, some of them in fine old buildings that have not had money spent on them since the 1950s.

The Gauthier and Maarif districts to the south are quieter, greener and where the good restaurants are, at a price. The corniche hotels are for people who want a sea view and do not mind being a taxi ride from everything.

Staying safe

Casablanca is a big city and behaves like one. Pickpocketing and snatch theft from the back of a motorbike are the two real risks, so keep a phone out of a back pocket and off a cafe table. The faux guide problem that wears people down in Fez barely exists here, except for a little of it around the old medina.

Walking alone late at night is not advised anywhere in the city; taxis are cheap and everywhere. Women get less unwanted attention here than in most Moroccan cities, and Casablanca is the most socially relaxed place in the country, but modest dress still saves comment.

Food and a drink

Casablanca eats better than the rest of Morocco and less traditionally. Seafood is the thing: the fish landed at the port turns up grilled and plain at places all over the city, and a plate of it with bread and a salad is the local lunch.

It is also the easiest city in the country for a drink. There are proper bars downtown, some of them nearly a century old, alongside the licensed restaurants in the southern districts. Ordinary Moroccan cafe culture runs alongside all of it, and a mint tea on a pavement watching the boulevard is free.

Casablanca gets a bad write-up, most of it deserved and none of it the whole story. It is loud, congested, short of anything pretty, and entirely uninterested in winning you over.

But the mosque is one of the great buildings of the last century, the downtown is an architectural set piece slowly falling apart in public, and Habous and the Jewish museum are the sort of thing a country's biggest city keeps and a tourist town does not. Give it two nights on the way in or the way out, and it earns them.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Casablanca worth visiting?
For two nights, yes. The Hassan II Mosque justifies the stop on its own, and the art deco downtown, the Habous quarter and the Jewish museum fill the rest honestly. It is not a place to give a week to, and nobody pretends otherwise.
How many days do you need in Casablanca?
Two nights. One day for the mosque and the coast, one afternoon for the medina and the boulevards, one morning for Habous and the museum. Anything more and you are looking for things to do.
Can non-Muslims go inside the Hassan II Mosque?
Yes, on a guided tour, and it is one of very few mosques in Morocco where that is true. Tours run several times a day in several languages, pause around Friday prayers, and take about an hour.
Is Casablanca a good first stop in Morocco?
It is a sensible one, because most international flights land here and it is gentler than Fez or Marrakech for a first day: fewer touts, wider streets, more French and English spoken. Rabat is under an hour by train if you would rather not stay.
Was the film Casablanca made in Casablanca?
No. It was shot entirely in California in 1942 and none of it was filmed in Morocco. The bar in the old medina that trades on it is an enjoyable evening and a recreation from the 2000s, not a location.
Can you change the plan?
Copy it into the planner and rearrange it: the mosque tour is the only thing with a fixed time, so the medina afternoon and the Habous morning swap freely around it.