Casablanca: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Casablanca is Morocco’s working city: about three and a half million people, the largest port in the country, and the place everyone else comes to for a job. It is not a tourist town and it does not pretend to be. What it does have is the second-largest mosque in Africa, a medina that was rebuilt after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 flattened the old one, and the only Jewish museum anywhere in the Arab world. Three hours, flat, and the mosque is seen on a guided tour only — there are four or five a day and they fill.
A short history of Casablanca
On this site stood the Berber town of Anfa, from which pirates set out to attack ships. In 1468 the Portuguese destroyed it, and later built a base here, which was abandoned after the earthquake of 1755. Around 1770 Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah rebuilt it and named it Dar al-Bayda, 'the white house'. In 1907 the French landed here, and the small town became Morocco's main port and economic centre. In January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill met here at the Casablanca Conference. In 1993 the Hassan II Mosque was completed, with a minaret more than 200 metres high.
The ten best sights in Casablanca
1Hassan II MosqueFrom 140 dirhams, guided tours only, and non-Muslims may go inside
2Mahkama du PachaFree when open, 64 rooms of carved plaster, and ask the guard
3Cathédrale Sacré-CœurFrom 20 dirhams, deconsecrated in 1956, and now an exhibition hall
4Notre-Dame de LourdesFree, a working church from 1954, and the stained glass covers 800 square metres
5Jewish Museum of CasablancaFrom 50 dirhams, the only Jewish museum in the Arab world, and closed Saturday
6Temple Beth-ElAsk at the door, a 1940s synagogue, and the stained glass is the reason
7Villa des ArtsFree, a 1934 art deco villa, Moroccan modern art, and closed Monday
8AbattoirsFree, a 1922 slaughterhouse turned culture space, and check what is on
9Grand ThéâtreFinished in 2022 by Zaha Hadid’s office, and the facade is one curve
10Bank Al-MaghribFrom outside, 1937, and it is the best art deco facade on the square
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Casablanca →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Casablanca:
Free walking tours in Casablanca
A mosque built out over the sea
Casablanca is Morocco’s working city: about three and a half million people, the largest port in the country, and the place everyone else comes to for a job. It is not a tourist town and it does not pretend to be. What it does have is the second-largest mosque in Africa, a medina that was rebuilt after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 flattened the old one, and the only Jewish museum anywhere in the Arab world. Three hours, flat, and the mosque is seen on a guided tour only — there are four or five a day and they fill.
- Hassan II Mosque · The minaret is two hundred and ten metres, the tallest religious structure in the world, and a laser at the top points towards Mecca for thirty kilometres. Part of the prayer hall is built out over the Atlantic on a platform, and sections of the floor are glass so you can see the water underneath. The roof opens. It was finished in 1993, cost around half a billion euros, and most of that was raised by public subscription — twelve million Moroccans contributed and were issued certificates.
- Old Medina · This medina is only about two hundred and fifty years old, which makes it a baby by Moroccan standards. The reason is the Lisbon earthquake of 1755: the tsunami and shock wrecked the town, and Sultan Mohammed the Third rebuilt it from scratch in the 1770s. So the lanes are straighter and the walls thinner than in Fez or Marrakesh, and almost nothing in it is medieval.
- Sqala · An eighteenth-century gun bastion on the sea wall, built facing outward because the threat always came from the sea — the Portuguese had sacked and occupied this place twice, in 1468 and 1515, and the town was abandoned for decades afterwards. The cannon embrasures are still in the wall, and a café now occupies the courtyard inside them.
- Marché Central · Opened in 1917 as part of the French plan for the new city, and it is still the place the city buys fish. The arrangement is worth knowing: you choose at a fishmonger’s slab, pay by weight, and carry it twenty metres to one of the small restaurants around the edge, which grills it for a fee. Nobody thinks of this as a tourist arrangement.
- Jewish Museum of Casablanca · The only Jewish museum in the Arab world, opened in 1997 in a former orphanage. There were about two hundred and fifty thousand Jews in Morocco in 1948 — the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world — and there are a few thousand now, most of them in this city. The museum holds complete synagogue interiors moved here from towns where no congregation is left.
- Habous quarter · This looks like an old medina and it was built in the 1920s and 1930s by French planners, on purpose, as a new one — arcaded streets, a mosque, a market and courtyard houses, all designed from scratch in a style called Mauresque. It was meant to house Moroccans moving into the city. It is the clearest example anywhere of a colonial power building tradition to order, and the bakeries in it are the best in Casablanca.
The art deco city
In 1912 Casablanca was a town of about twenty thousand people. The French made it their economic capital, hired the planner Henri Prost, and built an entire European city centre in twenty years — and because it all went up at once, in one period, the result is one of the largest concentrations of 1920s and 1930s architecture anywhere in the world. The local version mixes art deco with Moroccan carving and is called Mauresque. Most of it is shabby, occupied and unrestored, and all of it is above the shopfronts. Two and a half hours.
- Place Mohammed V · Prost laid this square out as the administrative centre, and every building on it is a public institution from the same decade: the courthouse, the prefecture with its clock tower, the central post office, the bank and the consulate. Look at the detail — the arcades, the green tiled roofs, the carved plaster around the doors — it is French civic architecture wearing Moroccan ornament, and that was the official policy.
- Bank Al-Maghrib · Finished in 1937 and the best-preserved facade on the square. The bronze doors, the stepped stone and the geometric grilles are all original. It is also a reminder of what the city was for: Casablanca was built as a machine for exporting phosphates, which Morocco has more of than any country on earth, and the bank was the till.
- Boulevard Mohammed V · The commercial spine, and the buildings on it carry names and dates carved into their facades — Villa Zevaco, Immeuble Bendahan, 1930, 1934 — because the architects signed their work. Many are in bad condition and some have collapsed; a 2020 collapse on a nearby street killed people, and the city is in a slow argument about who pays to restore privately owned heritage.
- Cinéma Rialto · Opened in 1930 as a music hall and cinema, and Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf both performed in it. Casablanca had around thirty cinemas in the 1950s and has a handful now; the Rialto still shows films, and its interior — the curved balcony, the metal railings, the original seating pattern — has not been modernised.
- Cathédrale Sacré-Cœur · Built in 1930 in white concrete, with Gothic proportions and no Gothic detail — the architect used reinforced concrete to get the height without the buttresses. It stopped being a church in 1956 when Morocco became independent and the French congregation left, and it has since been a school, a cultural centre and an exhibition hall. It is empty inside, which is the effect.
- Notre-Dame de Lourdes · A concrete church of 1954, still working, and the walls are eight hundred square metres of stained glass by Gabriel Loire — not pictures in windows but whole walls of coloured glass set in concrete frames, so the inside is lit entirely in blue and red. It is the single best interior of the French period in the city and almost nobody visits it.
The Atlantic, and Rabat up the coast
Casablanca faces the open Atlantic, which means cold water, real surf and a coastline that the city has turned into one long corniche of pools, clubs and beach bars. Ninety kilometres north is Rabat — the political capital, far smaller and far quieter, with a twelfth-century minaret that was abandoned half-built, a kasbah of blue and white lanes above the river mouth, and a Roman town that became a royal cemetery. The train from Casa Port takes an hour and runs every half hour. A full day.
- Ain Diab corniche · Four kilometres of seafront that the city rebuilt in the 2010s, and the water is the thing to understand: this is the open Atlantic, the Canary current brings it down cold, and it is around eighteen degrees in summer. That is why the corniche is lined with saltwater pools rather than beach clubs, and why the surf schools are busy in winter when the swell arrives.
- Sidi Abderrahmane · A white shrine complex on a rock just offshore, reachable on foot only at low tide and cut off completely at high tide. It is the tomb of a sixteenth-century holy man, and it has been a place women come to for help with illness, infertility and possession — there are practitioners living on the rock. Non-Muslims may walk out to it but not into the shrine itself.
- Hassan Tower · Begun in 1195 and intended to be the minaret of the largest mosque in the western Islamic world. The sultan died in 1199, work stopped, and the tower was left at forty-four metres of a planned eighty-six. The mosque itself was never roofed and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake took down the columns — so what stands is a field of two hundred stumps around an unfinished tower, and it is the same design as the Koutoubia and the Giralda.
- Kasbah of the Udayas · A walled quarter on the cliff where the Bou Regreg river meets the sea, and in the seventeenth century it was the base of the Republic of Salé — a corsair state run by Moriscos expelled from Spain, which raided as far as Iceland and sold Europeans in the market here. The blue and white paint on the lanes is twentieth-century; the walls and the gate are from 1195.
- Chellah · A Roman town called Sala Colonia, abandoned, and then walled in the fourteenth century by the Merinids who turned it into a royal necropolis — so you walk through a gate of 1339 into a Roman forum with a minaret standing in it. Storks nest on the minaret and on the walls, and the garden inside has run wild. The eels in the holy spring at the bottom are fed by visitors asking for children.
- Mohammed VI Museum · Morocco’s first purpose-built museum of modern art, opened in 2014, and the collection is Moroccan and African painting from 1900 onwards — which is the one thing none of the historical sites explain. It also runs large loan shows from European museums, which is unusual in North Africa and means the queue outside is local.
Getting to Casablanca and getting around
- Mohammed V Airport · 30 kilometres south, a train runs to Casa Port in 45 minutes for 45 dirhams
- Casa Voyageurs · The high-speed line to Tangier leaves from here, two hours and ten minutes
- Casa Port · The station for the medina and the mosque, and trains to Rabat every half hour
Cheap eats in Casablanca
Casablanca eats fish, because the port is the largest in Morocco and the catch lands here. The arrangement at the central market is the local institution: you buy at a slab by weight and carry it twenty metres to a small restaurant that grills it for a fee — sardines, sole, prawns, and whatever came in that morning. The other thing to know is that this is a working city with a French century behind it, so the cheap food is a mix of Moroccan counters and 1950s brasseries. Thirty to eighty dirhams a plate.
- Marché Central · 60 to 120 dirhams for two, cash, and lunch only
- Taverne du Dauphin · About 150 dirhams a head, closed Sunday, and no booking
- La Sqala · About 120 dirhams, in an 18th-century bastion, and breakfast is the meal to have
- Rick’s Café · About 300 dirhams a head, book ahead, and there is a dress code
- Habous bakeries · About 120 dirhams a kilo, and they are open till nine
- Bab Marrakech market · 20 to 40 dirhams, grilled meat and harira in the lanes, and all local
- Derb Sultan · The working-class food streets, cheapest in the city, and busy at eight at night
- Maarif · The middle-class eating quarter, cafés and grills, and open late
Museums in Casablanca
There is no great antiquities museum here — the ruins and the collections are in Rabat and Fez. What Casablanca has instead is the record of the twentieth century: the only Jewish museum in the Arab world, an art deco villa full of Moroccan modern painting, a slaughterhouse turned art space, and a deconsecrated cathedral that is now an empty hall people walk into for the acoustics.
- Jewish Museum of Casablanca · From 50 dirhams, closed Saturday, and an hour and a half
- Villa des Arts · Free, closed Monday, and the garden is open
- Abattoirs · Free, a 1922 slaughterhouse turned culture space, and the programme is irregular
- Cathédrale Sacré-Cœur · From 20 dirhams, empty inside, and the concrete vaults are the exhibit
- Mahkama du Pacha · Free when open, in Habous, and the guard decides
- Mohammed VI Museum, Rabat · From 60 dirhams, an hour away by train, and closed Tuesday
- Grand Théâtre · Finished in 2022, 1,800 seats, and the facade curve has no straight line in it
- Temple Beth-El · Ask at the door, and the stained glass was made in the 1940s
Nature and day trips near Casablanca
This is the Atlantic coast and the water is cold: the Canary current runs down past Morocco and keeps the sea at seventeen to nineteen degrees even in August, which is why the beach culture here is about surf and seawater pools rather than swimming. Inland there is almost nothing green — the city sits on a flat coastal plain that was farmland and is now suburbs — so the open space is either the coast or a planted eucalyptus forest.
- Ain Diab corniche · Free, four kilometres of seafront, and the pools are what people use
- Dar Bouazza · 25 kilometres south, a board and wetsuit about 200 dirhams
- Sidi Abderrahmane · Free, a shrine on a tidal rock, and check the tide before walking out
- Bouskoura forest · Free, 20 kilometres out, and the trails are marked
- Parc de la Ligue Arabe · Free, planted in 1918, palm avenues, and the only big park in the centre
- Mohammedia · 30 kilometres north, a long beach and a golf course, and a train every half hour
- El Jadida · 100 kilometres south, a Portuguese walled town, and a Unesco site
- Sidi Rahal · 90 kilometres south, a quiet beach town, and empty on weekdays
Things to do in Casablanca with kids
- Morocco Mall · Free to enter, the aquarium is extra, and a free shuttle downtown
- Sindibad Park · From 100 dirhams, rides and a small zoo, and it is the family day out
- Hassan II Mosque · The glass floor over the sea is the part children remember, and the tour is 45 minutes
- Ain Diab corniche · Free, flat for prams, and the pools have shallow ends
- Parc de la Ligue Arabe · Free, shade and playgrounds, and it is in walking distance of downtown
- Anfa Place · On the sea, air conditioned, and the terrace faces the surf
- Dar Bouazza · Surf schools take children from about eight, and the water is cold
- Bouskoura forest · Free, real shade, and families barbecue there at the weekend
Holy places in Casablanca
Casablanca is the one place in Morocco where a non-Muslim can go inside a working mosque — the Hassan the Second mosque runs guided tours, and the only other exception in the country is the ruined Tin Mal mosque in the Atlas. The city also holds what is left of the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world, and two French-period churches that are still standing, one of them deconsecrated and one still in use.
- Hassan II Mosque · From 140 dirhams, guided tours only, and shoulders and knees covered
- Jewish Museum of Casablanca · From 50 dirhams, closed Saturday, and the synagogue interiors are the collection
- Temple Beth-El · Ask at the door, outside service times, and no photographs
- Notre-Dame de Lourdes · Free, still a working church, and the glass walls are 800 square metres
- Cathédrale Sacré-Cœur · From 20 dirhams, deconsecrated in 1956, and the acoustics are the reason to stand still
- Sidi Abderrahmane · Free, low tide only, and ask before photographing anyone
- Chellah, Rabat · From 70 dirhams, a Roman town turned royal necropolis, and an hour by train
- Hassan Tower, Rabat · Free, a minaret left unfinished in 1199, and 200 column stumps around it
Nightlife in Casablanca
Casablanca has the most relaxed nightlife in Morocco, because it is the business capital and the licensing follows the money: there are real bars and real clubs, concentrated on the corniche at Ain Diab and in the Gauthier and Maarif quarters. Nothing starts before eleven and the clubs run to four. Almost nothing happens in the medina, and alcohol is not sold there at all. A beer is sixty to ninety dirhams in a club and thirty in an old brasserie.
- Ain Diab corniche · The clubs and beach bars, from eleven till four, and taxis wait outside
- Gauthier · The bar quarter in the centre, licensed, and quieter than the corniche
- Maarif · Cafés and restaurants open till one, and this is where the city eats late
- Rick’s Café · Live piano from nine, booked ahead, and the dress code is enforced
- La Sqala · In the bastion walls, no alcohol, and it closes at eleven
- Taverne du Dauphin · A 1958 brasserie, a beer is about 30 dirhams, and it shuts at eleven
- Grand Théâtre · 1,800 seats, concerts and opera, and the season is October to June
- Anfa Place · The terrace restaurants on the sea, open till midnight, and licensed
Frequently asked questions about Casablanca
What is there to see in Casablanca?
The top sights in Casablanca are Hassan II Mosque, Mahkama du Pacha and Cathédrale Sacré-Cœur. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Casablanca?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Casablanca without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Casablanca?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Casablanca, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: A mosque built out over the sea.
How do you get to Casablanca and get around?
The main ways are Mohammed V Airport, Casa Voyageurs and Casa Port. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Casablanca, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Casablanca that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Casablanca for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.