Casablanca: The Slow Pleasures of Morocco's Ocean City

Casablanca has a reputation problem. Travelers land at its airport, glance at the great mosque on the water, and hurry off to Marrakesh or Fez as if the city were only a doorway. That is a shame, and it is also an opportunity: nobody expects much of Casablanca, so the city has no chance to disappoint you.

Give it two unhurried nights and something else appears. This is Morocco's biggest city and its business capital, but it is also an Atlantic town, cooled all year by an ocean breeze, built in wide boulevards of white and cream plaster that catch the low afternoon light. There are pavement cafés on every corner, a modern tramway that glides where taxis crawl, and a shoreline promenade made for walking slowly.

Our angle here is simple: Casablanca rewards visitors who sit down. This is a guide for taking it gently — what to see, how far you will really walk, and where to put your feet up afterwards.

A little history

Long before the name Casablanca existed, an Amazigh port town called Anfa stood on this stretch of coast. The Portuguese destroyed it in the fifteenth century and later built their own fortified settlement here, calling it Casa Branca — the white house. The great earthquake of 1755, whose epicentre lay off Lisbon, wrecked the town and the Portuguese abandoned it.

It was Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah who rebuilt the place late in the eighteenth century, giving it a medina, mosques and the Arabic name Dar el-Beida — again, the white house. The Spanish traders who followed used their own translation, Casablanca, and that is the name that stuck.

The city you walk through today, though, is mostly a twentieth-century creation. After France established its protectorate in 1912, Casablanca grew at extraordinary speed into the country's main port and commercial centre. Its architects blended European Art Deco with Moroccan craft — carved plaster, zellige tilework, horseshoe arches — into a style often called Mauresque. Whole downtown blocks of it survive, weathered but dignified, and they are one of the best reasons to come.

Sour Jdid, the old fortified quarter on the edge of Casablanca's medina.

What to see

The Hassan II Mosque

Nothing else in Morocco prepares you for it. Completed in 1993 to a design by the French architect Michel Pinseau, and built by thousands of Moroccan craftsmen, the mosque stands on a promontory with part of its foundation reaching out over the Atlantic. The minaret rises about 210 metres, among the tallest in the world, and the prayer hall holds tens of thousands of worshippers beneath a roof that can be opened to the sky.

This is one of the few mosques in Morocco that non-Muslim visitors may enter, and only on a scheduled guided tour lasting roughly an hour. Tours run most days, with a later start on Fridays; buy tickets at the visitor entrance or online in advance. The esplanade around the mosque is vast, flat and open — glorious in the late afternoon, but with very little shade.

Mohammed V Square and the Art Deco downtown

The civic heart of the city, a broad square with a fountain, framed by grand 1920s and 1930s administrative buildings in that Mauresque blend of French and Moroccan detail. From here you can wander a few blocks of downtown at your own pace, looking up at balconies, ironwork and faded lettering. The Villa des Arts, a restored Art Deco mansion showing contemporary Moroccan art, makes a cool and quiet pause.

The Habous quarter

Built in the 1930s as a planned "new medina", Habous gives you arcaded lanes, white arches and small shops for leather, ceramics, spices, books and Moroccan pastries — with flat, orderly streets and far less pressure than an old medina. If you only shop once in Casablanca, do it here.

The old medina

Small by Moroccan standards and tucked between the port and the modern centre. It is workaday rather than picturesque, best entered near the old ramparts for half an hour of atmosphere before returning to the boulevards.

The open esplanade of the Hassan II Mosque, Casablanca.

Slow afternoons by the Atlantic

West of the mosque the city turns to face the sea. The Corniche at Ain Diab is a long seafront promenade of cafés, beach clubs, ice-cream counters and restaurants, where Casablancais of every age come out to walk in the late afternoon — families, grandparents, courting couples, joggers. It is level, paved and sociable, and you can do as much or as little of it as you like before choosing a terrace and watching the ocean do the rest.

Nearby stands the small white shrine of Sidi Abderrahmane on its rocky islet, reachable only at low tide and best simply admired from the shore. Further along, Rick's Café is an affectionate recreation of the bar from the 1942 film — worth knowing that the film itself was shot in Hollywood and not here, which somehow makes the pastiche more charming, not less.

One quiet tip: the tram's second line runs out to Ain Diab Plage, so you can reach the sea front without a taxi negotiation.

Sunday strollers on the Corniche in the Ain Diab district of Casablanca.

A day trip nearby

El Jadida, roughly 90 to 100 kilometres down the coast, is the obvious and genuinely worthwhile escape — about an hour and a half each way by road, or reachable by train via the coastal line, changing plans to suit your energy.

The draw is the old Portuguese fortified town of Mazagan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site: compact ramparts you can walk, sea air on all sides, and the remarkable Portuguese Cistern, an underground chamber of low arches and columns with a thin film of water on the floor that mirrors the whole vault. It is cool, dim and unforgettable — but reached by a flight of worn steps, so take a hand if you need one.

Alternatively, Rabat is about an hour away by frequent trains and makes an easy, greener, gentler capital-city day.

Honest advice for comfortable travel

• Stay downtown or by the sea, not near the airport. A hotel around Mohammed V Square or the Marché Central puts the Art Deco streets, cafés and the tram on your doorstep. A Corniche hotel trades walkability for sea air and quiet — both work, but choose one and taxi to the other.
• Casablanca is flat. Almost no hills, no stepped alleys, no donkeys: it is one of the easiest Moroccan cities to walk. The distances, however, are big — the mosque to the downtown is a good 30 to 40 minutes on foot. Use taxis for the links and save your legs for the sights.
• Pavements are the real obstacle. Kerbs are high, surfaces are uneven, and traffic is brisk. Cross with a local group rather than alone, and consider a walking stick with a firm tip.
• The mosque tour involves standing and some distance. Expect around an hour of walking and standing on marble, plus a large open forecourt. Ask the guide in advance which parts involve stairs, and don't be shy about waiting on a bench for the group.
• The trams are a gift. Modern, air-conditioned, level boarding, priority seats, and cheap. They are usually calmer than city buses.
• Dress for the ocean, not the desert. Even in summer the sea breeze is cool and evenings can feel chilly; bring a light jacket. Sun over the mosque esplanade is fierce, so a hat and water matter.
• Carry cash in small notes. Cards work in hotels and larger restaurants, but taxis, markets and small cafés prefer dirhams.
• Agree the taxi fare or ask for the meter before you get in, and keep your hotel's name written down in Arabic or French.

A tram at the Marché Central stop in central Casablanca at night.

What to eat

Casablanca eats from the Atlantic. The signature experience is the Marché Central, the covered downtown market, where you choose fish from the ice — sardines, sea bream, red mullet, squid, prawns — and carry it a few steps to a grill stall that cooks it for you with salt, cumin and lemon. It is noisy, wet underfoot and thoroughly cheerful; go at lunchtime and ask for a table away from the aisle.

Morocco's beloved sardine appears here in its best form: two fillets pressed around green chermoula, that garlicky marinade of coriander, parsley, cumin and lemon, then fried until the edges crisp. Look too for seafood pastilla — the famous sweet-savoury pie remade with fish and shellfish under crackling warqa pastry.

Beyond the sea, all the Moroccan classics are here: slow tagines, couscous on Fridays, harira soup, and maakouda, the deep-fried potato fritters sold on the street. Habous is the place for pastries and almond sweets, and no day should end without a glass of mint tea or a nous-nous — half coffee, half milk — at a pavement table. Casablanca's café culture is a genuine local institution, and sitting in it is not idling; it is participating.

A café on Boulevard Hassan Seghir in central Casablanca.

Getting there

Mohammed V Square in central Casablanca.

Our verdict

Casablanca will not charm you the way Chefchaouen or Essaouira does. It is a working city of several million people, loud at the edges, and it asks a little patience.

But for travelers over 60 it has quiet advantages that the postcard towns cannot match: flat streets, a clean modern tram, real hospitals and pharmacies, comfortable hotels at every level, direct flights home, and food that is fresh, simple and easy on the stomach. It is also the least performed city in Morocco — nobody is putting on a show for tourists here, and there is a certain relief in that.

Come for two nights at the start or end of a longer Moroccan trip. Stand on the esplanade of the Hassan II Mosque at sunset with the ocean crashing below it. Walk one slow hour through the Art Deco streets. Eat grilled sardines at the market, and drink your mint tea sitting down. That is Casablanca done properly, and done gently.

“A white city facing a grey ocean, where the sea air keeps every afternoon kind.”

Photo credits

• Sunrise in Casablanca with Hassan II Mosque: SpreeTom, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• SOUR JDID, Casablanca, Morocco - panoramio 16: karel291, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• The Open Area of Hassan II Mosque - Casablanca Morocco: Ayman.mesa25, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Promenade sur la Corniche Ain Diab à Casablanca - photo Bertrand SOUBEYRAND: Bertrand SOUBEYRAND, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Casablanca, Morocco at night, November 2023 - Tramway: Sharon Hahn Darlin, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Casablanca, Morocco November 2023 - Cafe: Sharon Hahn Darlin, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Casablanca, Morocco November 2023 - Mohammed V Square: Sharon Hahn Darlin, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons