Casablanca Beyond the Mosque: The Quarters Most Visitors Skip

Casablanca's tour-bus itinerary is brutally short: the great mosque, a photograph from the esplanade, gone by lunch. Plenty of Morocco itineraries treat the city as an airport with a monument attached — land, look, catch the afternoon train to Marrakech. Stay a few hours longer and the place starts repaying attention, in arcaded lanes built to an architect's idea of a souk, faded Deco facades with ocean-liner curves, a working medina nobody has tidied for visitors, and an Atlantic corniche that belongs almost entirely to locals.

These are the quarters worth your walk, in the order we would walk them, with an honest note about which parts are scruffy and which are shut.

Key facts

• How long: one full day covers the four quarters at a decent pace. Two days lets you add the museums and eat properly.
• Getting around: petit taxis are cheap and everywhere — ask for the meter, the compteur, before you sit down. The tram crosses the centre, and a single ride typically costs around 8 dirhams at the time of writing, with transfers included for a couple of hours.
• Best hours: Habous and the old medina in the morning, downtown Deco after lunch, the corniche at sunset.
• Walking note: the distances between quarters are real. Taxi between them, walk within them.
• From the airport: trains run into the centre roughly every half-hour through the day, take something like 35 to 45 minutes, and cost in the region of 50 to 60 dirhams in second class. Casa Port is the stop for the old medina and the Deco blocks; Casa Voyageurs is the one for onward trains.

How to shape the day

The single most useful thing to know about Casablanca is that its sights are not walkable as a chain. Habous sits a few kilometres south of the centre, the old medina and the Deco blocks are adjacent to each other by the port, and Ain Diab is another stretch west along the coast. Try to string them together on foot and you will spend the day on six-lane boulevards with nothing to look at.

So: three taxi hops, three walks. Start in Habous early, when the arcades are cool and the merchants are still setting up. Take a taxi back into the centre by late morning for the old medina, which is at its best while the vegetable stalls are trading. Eat lunch near the port or at the central market. Spend the early afternoon walking the Deco spine with your eyes raised to the first and second floors. Duck into one museum when the light goes flat around three. Then take the last taxi of the day west to the corniche and stay for sunset.

If you want the Hassan II Mosque as well — and you should see it, the postcard is a postcard for a reason — put it first, before Habous, or slot it in before the corniche. Interiors are visitable only on the scheduled guided tours, which run several times each morning and again in mid-afternoon, with an extra late-afternoon slot added in the summer half of the year. Expect to pay in the region of 140 dirhams as a foreign adult, less for students and children, and allow about an hour. Turning up between slots means looking at the doors.

With only one day, drop the museums rather than the corniche. The museums are good; the corniche is the part of Casablanca that explains the city.

Habous: the medina that was designed

Laid out by French planners from the late 1910s onward and built out through the 1920s and 1930s, the Quartier Habous is an architectural curiosity that has quietly become the most pleasant place to shop in the city. The brief was a "new medina" — traditional Moroccan arcades, whitewashed arches and courtyards, but set out with modernist tidiness, right angles where a real medina would have a dead end. The result should feel like a theme park and does not. Ninety-odd years of ordinary trade have worn it in.

What is actually here: olive merchants with barrels of violet and green fruit, bookbinders and second-hand booksellers, brassware, babouches, rugs, gandoras, and a long row of pastry counters. To our eye this is the least pressured souk shopping anywhere in Morocco — you can stop, look, put something down and walk away without a negotiation breaking out. Prices still start high for visitors; a polite counter-offer of roughly half is normal and nobody is offended.

Pâtisserie Bennis Habous is the stop worth planning around. The family has been making Moroccan pastry in the quarter since the 1930s and is known nationally for its kaab el ghazal — gazelle horns, almond paste in a thin pastry crescent — as well as briouats and savoury pastilla. It typically opens mid-morning, closes for a couple of hours in the early afternoon and trades again into the evening, though hours shift with the season and with Ramadan. Pastries are sold by weight; a small mixed box usually comes to a few tens of dirhams. Buy more than you think you need, because it is the best thing you will eat standing up all week.

Two buildings anchor the quarter. The Mahkama du Pacha, a 1940s courthouse and reception hall in a Hispano-Moorish style, is a genuinely extraordinary interior of carved cedar, zellij and painted ceilings — and it remains a working government building, so access is occasional at best, usually on weekday mornings and never guaranteed. Ask at your hotel on the day rather than building a plan on it; the exterior and its long arcaded facade photograph beautifully regardless. Across the way, the Royal Palace of Casablanca shows you its gates and its orange trees and nothing else, which is still worth two minutes.

Give Habous ninety minutes to two hours. A taxi from the centre should be a short metered ride in the region of 20 to 40 dirhams depending on traffic, which in Casablanca is the only real variable.

The old medina: rough, real and recovering

Casablanca's original walled quarter, squeezed between the port and the downtown boulevards, lacks the polish of Fez or Marrakech — and that is precisely its interest. Most of what stands dates from the nineteenth century, and it has never been curated. This is a lived-in working medina: vegetable stalls, tailors, phone-repair counters, hardware sellers, tiny mosques, laundry over the lanes. Parts of the western walls, the bastion and the surrounding streets have been restored in recent years and the difference shows, block by block.

Enter from Place des Nations Unies, beside the clock tower — a 1990s replica of a French-built original from just after 1910 — or from Bab Marrakech on the southern side. Keep your wandering to daylight hours, carry little, and be relaxed about getting lost, because the quarter is small enough that ten minutes in any direction returns you to a main road. The usual caution applies rather than any special one: this is a busy working neighbourhood, not a no-go area, and the most likely inconvenience is an insistent offer of guiding.

At the seaward corner stands La Sqala, the surviving eighteenth-century bastion of the old fortifications, with cannon still trained on the Atlantic. The restaurant built inside it, also called La Sqala, is the pleasant lunch in this part of town: Moroccan cooking in an Andalusian-style garden behind the ramparts, open through the day. Expect a bill somewhere in the low hundreds of dirhams a head for a full lunch, less if you stop only for mint tea and a pastry, and book ahead at weekends.

The other lunch, and the one we would choose on a first visit, is the Marché Central on the downtown side of the boulevard. Pick your fish from the ice at the seafood stalls, agree a price, then hand it to one of the adjacent grill counters, which will cook it for a small additional charge. Go around the middle of the day, when the turnover is fastest; by late afternoon the good stuff is gone. Allow an hour or so for the medina walk itself, and another for lunch.

Downtown's Art Deco spine

The blocks radiating from Place Mohammed V and running along Boulevard Mohammed V hold the reason architects come to Casablanca at all: a dense run of 1920s and 1930s buildings in which French Deco was crossed with Moroccan ornament to produce something that exists almost nowhere else. Casamémoire, the heritage association that has campaigned for years to have the city centre recognised on the UNESCO list, argues that the concentration here is of world significance; walk it and the case makes itself. Mauresque plasterwork over ocean-liner curves. Wrought-iron balconies stacked eight storeys up. Shopfronts in original lettering. Stairwells you can see from the pavement, tiled to the ceiling.

Walk it with your eyes at first-floor level and above. Street level has been refitted a dozen times; everything above it is intact and largely unrenovated, which is both the charm and the tragedy. Start at Place Mohammed V, where the administrative buildings and the fountain give you the scale of the colonial plan, and where the vast bulk of the Grand Théâtre (CasArts) by Christian de Portzamparc now sits, structurally finished but slow to open — check whether anything is actually programmed before you build an evening around it. Then walk northeast along Boulevard Mohammed V.

The set pieces on that stretch: the Cinema Rialto, a 1929 picture palace where Josephine Baker is said to have performed for American troops during the war, shuttered at the time of writing and worth the facade alone; the Immeuble Liberté, a slender 1950 tower reported at its completion to be the tallest building in Africa; and the long-ruined Hôtel Lincoln, a neo-Moorish pile from the First World War years that partly collapsed after a storm and has spent well over a decade behind scaffolding, with a hotel reopening repeatedly announced and repeatedly delayed. To our mind this walk is the closest thing the city has to a free open-air museum, and it takes about ninety minutes done slowly.

If you would rather not do it alone, Casamémoire runs guided routes through the centre, the old medina, Habous and the workers' housing district of Hay Mohammadi, typically two to three hours; they are best arranged in advance, and the annual heritage days in the autumn open buildings that are closed the rest of the year.

The quiet museums, and a church with no congregation

The former cathedral of Casablanca, the Sacré-Cœur, is a startling white Neo-Gothic-meets-Deco structure finished around 1930 that stopped being a church after independence. It has since been restored and now operates as a cultural venue with exhibitions and concerts, near the Parc de la Ligue Arabe. Entry is typically around 50 dirhams for adults and roughly half that for under-25s, and it usually opens from early morning until early evening — though access closes off entirely when an event is being staged, so it is worth checking on the day. Even if you only circle the outside, the silhouette is one of the strangest in North Africa.

Two small museums reward an hour each. The Musée Abderrahman Slaoui, in a 1940s villa near the centre, holds one collector's magpie assembly of Orientalist travel posters, Amazigh silver, gold jewellery and crystal scent flasks across three floors, with a roof café. It generally opens Tuesday to Saturday, roughly from mid-morning to early evening, and admission is usually about 60 dirhams with steep reductions for students. The Museum of Moroccan Judaism, out in the residential Oasis quarter, is described by its foundation and by most accounts as the only museum of Jewish life in the Arab world: synagogue reconstructions, textiles, ritual objects and photographs documenting a community that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It typically opens on weekdays only, closed Saturdays, roughly mid-morning to late afternoon, with entry in the region of 50 dirhams. Call ahead; the opening is genuinely variable.

One more, and it is free: Notre-Dame de Lourdes, a 1950s concrete church south of the centre whose side walls are effectively a single continuous stained-glass panel by Gabriel Loire of Chartres. On a bright afternoon the interior turns deep blue and red. Nobody sends you here, which is the point of this article. The Villa des Arts, a 1934 Deco villa near Parc de la Ligue Arabe showing contemporary Moroccan and African work, is also free and usually open most days.

Ain Diab and the corniche: Casablanca off duty

West of the mosque, the oceanfront corniche is where the city exhales. Families promenade at sunset, boys play football on the sand, surfers work an Atlantic swell that is serious enough to have produced a local scene, and café terraces face straight into the setting sun. Almost no foreign visitor makes it past the mosque esplanade. The evening paseo here is the most local hour you can spend in Casablanca, and it costs nothing.

The strip runs several kilometres, from the mosque out past Ain Diab to the big mall at the western end. Walk the section around Ain Diab rather than trying to do all of it; a taxi out from the centre is usually a metered ride in the region of 30 to 60 dirhams. Beach clubs line the landward side and most charge for a day pass — pleasant if you want a pool and a lounger, entirely skippable if you want the city. The public beach is fine for a walk and for watching, less so for swimming: the Atlantic here is cold year-round and the currents are not gentle.

If you want to get in the water properly, the surf schools along the corniche run lessons with boards and wetsuits included, typically around 150 dirhams an hour for a private session at the time of writing, with cheaper group rates. Beginners do best from around September to April, when the swell is more consistent.

At the far end, the shrine of Sidi Abderrahmane sits on a rocky islet reachable on foot at low tide — a small whitewashed village of a place, long associated with healers and still a working religious site, so the shrine itself is not open to non-Muslims. The walk out at dusk, with the tide going and the city glowing behind you, is the image of Casablanca most people never take home.

For dinner, Rick's Café, in a restored riad-style house near the medina walls, is the film homage — opened in 2004, piano in the corner, and entirely unembarrassed about it. It is a tourist institution rather than a hidden gem, the bill runs well above the city average, and it is still a good evening if you go with clear eyes. Lunch service runs around midday to mid-afternoon and dinner from early evening until very late; reserve, especially at weekends, or you will be standing at the bar.

When to come, and when it does not work

Spring and early autumn are the right answer. April to early June, and September into October, give you high teens to low twenties Celsius, long light and almost no rain — ideal for a day built around walking. October in particular has the best light of the year on those Deco facades.

Midsummer is more complicated than the temperature suggests. Casablanca is usually moderate in July and August thanks to the ocean, but two things interfere. Sea fog is common on summer mornings and can grey out the whole coast until mid-morning, which matters if you were planning photographs. And the chergui, a dry easterly off the interior, can push the city from the mid-twenties into the forties within hours, most often in July and August. When it blows, the medina and Habous are punishing and the corniche is the only civilised place to be.

Winter, from about November to February, brings most of the year's rain and daytime highs in the high teens. It is perfectly workable for the indoor half of this itinerary — the museums, the market, the Deco interiors — but the corniche evening, which is the best thing here, does not survive a wet Tuesday. Check the dates of Ramadan before booking: daytime opening is shortened everywhere, most restaurants close until sunset, and the city after dark becomes something else entirely, better in some ways and much harder to plan around.

What to skip, and why

The mosque esplanade as your only stop. It is what everyone does, and it is why people tell you Casablanca is boring.

Long walks between quarters. The boulevards connecting them are wide, loud and empty of interest. Taxis cost almost nothing; use them and save your legs for the lanes.

The big shopping malls at the western end of the corniche, unless you specifically need air conditioning and a chain coffee. You can get that at home.

Unmetered taxis. The meter, the compteur, exists and should be running. A driver who refuses it is negotiating, and the number will be several times the real fare.

Booking the Mahkama or the Grand Théâtre into a fixed itinerary. Both are magnificent and neither reliably lets you in. Treat them as bonuses.

Tip: Do the quarters in this order — Habous mid-morning, the old medina and a market lunch at noon, the Deco boulevards through the afternoon, the corniche for sunset — and you will have seen more of Casablanca in a day than most guided tours manage in a week of stops.

The mosque is the postcard. These quarters are the city.