The Atlantic coast: Rabat to Essaouira
This five-hundred-kilometre stretch of Atlantic coastline takes in Morocco’s urban heartland and accounts for close to a fifth of the country’s total population. It’s an astonishingly recent growth along what was, until the French Protectorate, a neglected strip of coast. The region is dominated by the country’s elegant, orderly administrative capital, Rabat and the dynamic commercial capital, Casablanca. Keep heading south, and you’ll encounter some delightfully low-key coastal resorts, including El Jadida, Oualidia and Essaouira. This is the most Europeanized part of Morocco, where you’ll see middle-class people in particular wearing Western-style clothes and leading what appear, on the surface at least, to be quite European lifestyles.
The fertile plains inland from Rabat (designated Maroc Utile, or “Useful Morocco”, by the French) have been occupied and cultivated since Paleolithic times, with Neolithic settlements on the coast to the south, notably at present-day Temara and Skhirat, but today it is French and post-colonial influences that dominate in the main coastal cities. Don’t go to Casa – as Casablanca is popularly known – expecting some exotic movie location; it’s a modern city that looks very much like Marseilles, the French seaport on which it was modelled. Rabat, too, which the French developed as a capital in place of the old imperial centres of Fez and Marrakesh, looks markedly European, with its cafés and boulevards, though it also has some of Morocco’s finest and oldest monuments, dating from the Almohad and Merenid dynasties. If you’re on a first trip to Morocco, Rabat is an ideal place to get to grips with the country. Its Westernized streets make an easy cultural shift and it’s an excellent transport hub, well connected by train with Tangier, Fez and Marrakesh. Casa is maybe more interesting after you’ve spent a while in the country, when you’ll appreciate both its differences and its fundamentally Moroccan character.
Along the coast are a large number of beaches, but this being the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean, tides and currents can be strong. Surfing is a popular sport along the coast and Essaouira is Morocco’s prime resort for windsurfing.
Although by no means an idyllic stretch of sand, the coast from Kenitra to Rabat still has a few decent beaches and a couple of attractions that are worthy stops along this very busy section of the national highway.
KENITRA was established by the French as Port Lyautey – named after the Resident General – with the intention of channelling trade from Fez and Meknes. It never quite took off, however, losing out in industry and port activities to Casablanca, despite the rich farming areas of its hinterland. Today, it has a population of around 400,000, employed mainly in paper mills and a fish cannery. It’s livelier than most Moroccan towns of its size, with a noticeably friendly atmosphere that goes some way to make up for the paucity of sights. There are also several beaches within easy reach.
Alamy
THE BEACH AT ESSAOUIRA
Highlights
Hassan Mosque, Rabat Never completed, the minaret of this Almohad mosque is a masterpiece of Islamic architecture.
Chellah, Rabat As beautiful a ruin as you could imagine, with Roman remains and royal tombs from the Merenids.
Colonial architecture, Casablanca Downtown Casa is a living monument to French 1930s Art Deco styles.
Hassan II Mosque, Casablanca One of the world’s largest, Hassan II’s great mosque can (unusually for Morocco) be visited by non-Muslims.
Cité Portugaise, El Jadida Walk round the ramparts of this unique UNESCO World Heritage Site, and check out the cistern where Orson Welles filmed Othello.
Oualidia oysters North Africa’s finest, best eaten fresh at one of this friendly coastal town’s lagoonside restaurants.
Essaouira Morocco’s most relaxed seaside town, with a Medina that’s easy to explore and a wide bay perfect for kite- and windsurfers.
Highlights are marked on the map
Kenitra has two main streets: Avenue Mohammed V, the town’s main artery, which runs east to west, and Avenue Mohammed Diouri, running north to south. The central square, dominated by the baladiya (town hall), is Place de Municipalité, two blocks north of Avenue Mohammed V and three blocks east of Avenue Mohammed Diouri.
By train There are two train stations: Kenitra station, the most central, at the southern end of Av Mohammed Diouri; and Kenitra Medina, one stop north, off the eastern end of Av Mohammed V and near the bus station.
Destinations Asilah (8 direct & 2 connecting daily; 2hr 30min); Casa Port (roughly hourly 5.50am–10.10pm; 1hr 40min); Casa Voyageurs (1–2 hourly 4.25am–9.20pm; 1hr 40min); Fez (hourly 9.48am–11.50pm; 2hr); Marrakesh (9 daily; 5hr); Mohammedia (1–3 hourly; 1hr 15min); Rabat (1–3 hourly; 35min); Tangier (8 direct & 2 connecting daily; 3hr 15min).
By bus All companies, including CTM, operate from the main gare routière, 200m north of Av Mohammed V and three blocks east of Pl de Municipalité.
Destinations Casablanca (10 daily; 2hr 30min); Chefchaouen via Ouezzane (5 daily; 3hr); Larache (15 daily; 1hr 45min); Rabat (roughly hourly; 1hr); Souk el Arba du Rharb (10 daily; 1hr 15min); Tangier (5 daily; 3hr).
By grand taxi Grands taxis for Souk el Arba du Rharb (change here for Chefchaouen) operate from the gare routière, while those for Rabat leave from Av Mohammed Diouri, one block north of Av Mohammed V.
Destinations Rabat (45min); Souk el Arba du Rharb (1hr).
Ambassy 20 Av Hassan II 
0537 379978. Basic but central; each room has a little laundry room as well as a bathroom, and some have a/c. There are also two smoky bars (one with a pool table) and a mediocre fish restaurant. BB €€
Mamora Pl Administrative 0537 371775, 
mamorakenitra.com. Art Deco-era, business-class hotel with slightly small but good-value, modern rooms. There’s a pleasant swimming pool, comfortable bar and reasonable restaurant, albeit with a limited menu. BB €€€
De la Poste 307 Av Mohammed V 0537 377769. The best of the town’s cheapies, this friendly little place is about halfway up the avenue and close to a number of cafés. The tiled rooms (ask for extra blankets in winter) are bright and well kept, and simply furnished with comfortable beds and antique wardrobes. Rooms are en suite. €
Relax Parc d´Activite Commerciale Marjane relaxmaroc.com. Kenitra’s newest hotel, part of a chain, with a pool and restaurant, a couple of kilometres south of town near the Marjane hypermarket. €€
Eating, drinking and nightlife
Café Metropole Cnr Av Mohammed V & Rue Sebta. Classy, comfortable establishment on the main street, with seating on a street-side wooden deck or inside the non-smoking, female-friendly a/c interior, decorated with pictures of New York. The menu ranges from breakfast and light meals to pizza, pasta dishes and ice creams. €€
River Club Rue el Jahid riverclub.ma. True to its name, this popular café-restaurant commands a beautiful, sweeping view over the Oued Sebou. There are plenty of tables both inside and outside, and the menu offers panini, pasta and Moroccan standards. Mosquitoes are sometimes a problem on summer evenings. €€
Banks Banks can be found along avenues Mohammed V and Mohammed Diouri; Currency Exchange Point, Rue Al Mountanabi (opposite Hôtel la Rotonde).
Post office Av Hassan II, just off Pl Administrative.
12km southwest of Kenitra • Free • 0537 747209 • Bus #15 from Kenitra (35min)
The birdlife-rich but rubbish-strewn Lac Sidi Boughaba is a narrow freshwater lake divided by a central causeway that gives access to the lake’s southern edge. This is also where you’ll find the National Centre for Environmental Education (CNEE), focused mainly on environmental education for local schoolchildren. The best viewing points for the lake’s birdlife are from the causeway or the viewing deck at the education centre.
17km north of Rabat • Bus #28 runs hourly between Plage des Nations and Av Moulay Hassan in Rabat via Bab Khemis in Salé (50min); grands taxis operate from Salé during summer (30min)
The Plage des Nations (also called Sidi Bouknadel) was named after the foreign diplomats and their families who started swimming here in the 1970s – and continue to do so. With a popular corniche promenade and overlooked by a large residential golf estate, it has a very relaxed, friendly and cosmopolitan feel about it and is unusual in that young Moroccan women feel able to come out here for the day. The beach itself is relatively clean, with big, exciting waves but dangerous currents, and is patrolled by lifeguards during the summer months.
N1 Highway, directly opposite the turn-off for Plage des Nations (Sidi Bouknadel) • Charge
The Museé Dar Belghazi is home to four rooms of manuscripts, nineteenth-century carpets and textiles, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ceramics, and examples of woodwork, armour and jewellery. There’s not much by way of explanatory text in the museum other than a small booklet in French and Arabic, and it's expensive, but if you have a particular interest in Moroccan or Islamic art, then the trip out here is worthwhile.
Accommodation and eatingPlage des Nations
Firdaous Plage des Nations 0537 822131. A 1970s-style resort hotel that seems to be stuck in a time warp, located right on the beach – all rooms have a sea view, and you can get a suite for not much more than the price of a room. There’s a swimming pool, plus a bar, restaurant and snack bar. BB €€
Les Jardins Exotiques de Bouknadel
N1 Highway, 6km south of Plage des Nations, 13km north of Rabat • Charge • jardinsexotiques.com • Bus #9 (to Kenitra) from Bab Chellah and Bab el Had in Rabat (30min)
The Jardins Exotiques de Bouknadel are a very pleasant and tranquil respite from the everyday traffic noise and commotion just metres from their walls. A compact botanical haven, the gardens were laid out by French horticulturalist Marcel François in the early 1950s, fell into decline in the 1980s and were rescued in 2003 by the king’s “Fondation Pour la Protection de l’Environnement”, being assiduously renovated before a grand reopening in 2005.
Entering the gardens, colour-coded paths direct visitors across a series of bamboo bridges and through a sequence of regional creations. There’s a Brazilian rainforest, a formal Japanese garden, a Mexican cactus garden, and a piece of French Polynesia, with palm trees all round and flashes of bright red flowers. The last of the series is an Andalusian garden with a fine collection of Moroccan plants. There’s also a terrarium, and a museum detailing the gardens’ transformation.
Worth a visit at any time of the year but particularly delightful in spring or early summer, the gardens are popular with school groups during the week and families at weekends.
Capital of the nation since 1912, elegant and spacious RABAT is the very image of an orderly administrative and diplomatic centre. Lacking the frenetic pace of Morocco’s other large cities, Rabat is sometimes harshly referred to as “provincial”. Sure enough, there are times when it’s hard to find a café open much past ten at night, but there’s other times when the city comes out from its conservatism and even makes a little noise, such as during the Festival of Rhythms each May. Befitting its regal status, Rabat – along with neighbouring Salé – has some of the most interesting historic and architectural monuments in the country, and the fact that the local economy does not depend on tourist money makes exploring these attractions a great deal more relaxed than cities like Fez and Marrakesh.
The Phoenicians established a settlement at Sala, around the citadel known today as Chellah. This eventually formed the basis of an independent Berber state, which reached its peak of influence in the eighth century, developing a code of government inspired by the Koran but adapted to Berber customs and needs. It represented a challenge to the Islamic orthodoxy of the Arab rulers of the interior, however, and to stamp out the heresy, a ribat – the fortified monastery from which the city takes its name – was founded on the site of the present-day kasbah. The ribat’s presence led to Chellah’s decline – a process hastened in the eleventh century by the founding of a new town, Salé, across the estuary.
The Almohads rebuilt the kasbah and, in the late twelfth century, Yacoub el Mansour (“the Victorious”) created a new imperial capital here. His reign lasted almost thirty years, allowing El Mansour to leave a legacy that includes the superb Oudaïa Gate of the kasbah, Bab er Rouah at the southwest edge of town, and the early stages of the Hassan Mosque. He also erected over 5km of fortifications, though it is only in the last sixty years that the city has expanded to fill his circuit of pisé walls.
After Mansour’s death, Rabat’s significance was dwarfed by the imperial cities of Fez, Meknes and Marrakesh, and the city fell into neglect. Sacked by the Portuguese, it was little more than a village when, as New Salé, it was resettled by seventeenth-century Andalusian refugees. In this revived form, however, it entered into an extraordinary period of international piracy and local autonomy. Its corsair fleets, the Sallee Rovers, specialized in the plunder of merchant ships returning to Europe from West Africa and the Spanish Americas, but on occasion raided as far afield as Plymouth and the Irish coast – Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe began his captivity “carry’d prisoner into Sallee, a Moorish port”.
The Andalusians, owing no loyalty to the Moorish sultans and practically impregnable within their kasbah perched high on a rocky bluff above the river, established their own pirate state, the Republic of the Bou Regreg. They rebuilt the Medina below the kasbah in a style reminiscent of their homes in the Spanish city of Badajoz, dealt in arms with the English and French, and even accepted European consuls, before the town finally reverted to government control under Moulay Rachid, and his heavy-handed successor, Moulay Ismail.
Unofficial piracy continued until 1829 when Austria took revenge for the loss of a ship by shelling Rabat and other coastal towns. From then until the French made it their colonial capital, moving it from the more conservative and harder to defend Fez, Rabat-Salé was very much a backwater. Upon independence in 1956, and perhaps also concerned about the influence wielded by Fez, Mohammed V decided to keep Rabat as the country’s capital. It’s taken a few generations, but the city now seems comfortable with this weighty responsibility and, of late, has begun to promote itself as more than just a residence for the diplomatic and governmental corps. A number of large-scale developments, including a revamped riverside promenade and a new tramway system, were pushed through specifically to benefit the local people.
Rabat’s Medina – all that there was of the city until the French arrived in 1912 – is a compact quarter, wedged on two sides by the sea and the river, on the others by the twelfth-century Almohad and seventeenth-century Andalusian walls. It’s open and orderly in comparison to those of Fez or Marrakesh, and still essentially the town created by Muslim refugees from Badajoz in Spain, but with its external features intact, its way of life seems remarkably at odds with the government business and cosmopolitanism of the Ville Nouvelle.
The Medina’s plan is typical of others in Morocco, with a main market street – Rue Souika and its continuation Souk es Sebbat – running beside the Grand Mosque, and behind it a residential area scattered with smaller souks and “parish” mosques. The buildings, characteristically Andalusian, like those of Tetouan or Chefchaouen, are part stone and part whitewash, with splashes of yellow and turquoise and great, dark-wood studded doors.
From Boulevard Hassan II, half a dozen gates and a series of streets give access to the Medina, all leading more or less directly through the quarter, to emerge near the kasbah and the hillside cemetery. On the west side, the two main streets – Avenue Mohammed V and Rue Sidi Fatah – are really continuations of Ville Nouvelle avenues, though, flanked by working-class café-restaurants and cell-like hotels, their character is immediately different. Entering along either street, past a lively, modern food market and a handful of stalls selling fruit, juice and snacks, you can turn right along Rue Souika, which is dominated by textiles and silverware along the initial stretch, giving way to shoe stalls as you approach the Grand Mosque. The shops are all fairly everyday, and not, for the most part, geared to tourists.
The existence of so many ancient, walled Medinas in Morocco – intact and still bustling with life – is largely due to Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the first of France’s Resident Generals, and the most sympathetic to local culture. In colonizing Algeria, the French had destroyed most of the Arab towns, and Lyautey found this already under way when he arrived in Rabat in 1912, but, realizing the aesthetic loss – and the inappropriateness of wholesale Europeanization – he ordered demolition to be halted and had the Ville Nouvelle built outside the walls instead. His precedent was followed throughout the French and Spanish zones of the country, inevitably creating “native quarters”, but preserving continuity with the past. Lyautey left Morocco in 1925 but when he died in 1934 he was returned and buried in a Moorish monument in Rabat until 1961, when his body was “repatriated” to Paris.
Rabat carpets, woven with very bright dyes (which, if vegetable-based, will fade), are a traditional cottage industry in the Medina, though they’re now often made in workshops, one of which you can see on the kasbah’s plateforme. Some of the traditional carpets on sale, particularly in the shops, will have come from further afield. They are officially graded at a special centre just off Rue des Consuls – to the right as you climb towards the kasbah.
The upper, terraced end of Rue des Consuls, in Rabat’s Medina, is a centre for rug and carpet shops. On Monday and Thursday mornings, a souk for carpets new and old takes place here, and on the adjoining street of Souk es Sebbat.
Souk es Sebbat • Entry to the mosque is forbidden to non-Muslims
There are few buildings of particular interest in the Medina, as most of the medieval city – which predated that of the Andalusians – was destroyed by Portuguese raids in the sixteenth century. The Grand Mosque, founded by the Merenids in the fourteenth century, is an exception, though it has been considerably rebuilt – its minaret, for example, was completed in 1939. Opposite, there is a small example of Merenid decoration in the stone facade of a public fountain, which now forms the front of an Arabic bookshop.
The Mellah, the old Jewish quarter, lies to the east of Rue Oukassa, and remains the poorest and most run-down area of the city. It was only designated a Jewish quarter in 1808 – Jews previously owned several properties on Rue des Consuls, to the north – and no longer has a significant Jewish population. If you can find a local guide, you may be able to look into some of its seventeen former synagogues. None of these function: the only active synagogue in the city is a modern building, one block from here, at the northern end of Rue Moulay Ismail.
With its meat and produce markets, the Mellah looks a somewhat uninviting and impenetrable area, but it is worth wandering through towards the river. A daily joutia, or flea market, spreads out along the streets below Souk es Sebbat, down to Bab el Bahr. There are clothes, pieces of machinery, and general bric-a-brac, with the odd bargain occasionally to be found.
Like the Mellah, Rue des Consuls used to be a reserved quarter – the only street of the nineteenth-century city where European consuls were permitted to live. Many of the residency buildings survive, as do a number of impressive merchants’ fondouks – most in the alleys off to the west (the French consul’s residence, now rather run-down, is at the end of an alley called Impasse du Consulat de France). Shopping is pleasantly hassle-free, and there are some good jewellery shops, with a mix of Middle Eastern and European designs at good prices.
The site of the original ribat and citadel of the Almohad, Merenid and Andalusian towns, the Kasbah des Oudaïas continues to stand sentry over the mouth of the Oued Bou Regreg. Only 150 metres from end to end, the kasbah is an evocative, village-like quarter of whitewashed houses with brightly coloured doors and is a delight to explore.
The kasbah’s main gate, Bab Oudaïa, is from the Almohad period, like so many of Morocco’s great monuments. Built around 1195, it was inserted by Yacoub el Mansour into a line of walls already built by his grandfather, Abd el Moumen. The walls in fact extended well to its west, leading down to the sea at the edge of the Medina (excavations are now revealing some of these), and the gate cannot have been designed for any real defensive purpose – its function and importance must have been ceremonial. It would have been the heart of the kasbah, its chambers acting as a courthouse and staterooms, with everything of importance taking place nearby. The Souk el Ghezel – the main commercial centre of the medieval town, including its wool and slave markets – was located just outside the gate, while the original sultanate’s palace stood immediately inside.
The main entrance to the kasbah is through a gateway to the right of Bab Oudaïa itself (which is usually closed except when used for exhibitions). From here, Rue Jamaa (Street of the Mosque) runs straight down to a broad terrace commanding views of the river and sea. Along the way, you pass by the Kasbah Mosque, the city’s oldest, founded in 1050, though rebuilt in the eighteenth century by an English renegade known as Ahmed el Inglisi – one of a number of European pirates who joined up with the Sallee Rovers. El Inglisi was also responsible for several of the forts built below and round the seventeenth-century plateforme, originally a semaphore station, on which was built an eighteenth-century warehouse, with views across to Salé.
Access into the kasbah is also possible via a horseshoe arch at the bottom of the stairway, close to the entrance to Musée des Oudaïa. This leads (straight ahead) through a door in the palace wall to Rue Bazo, where a right turn will take you down to the Café Maure, a fine place to retreat, high on a terrace overlooking the river.
Kasbah; access is via a small gateway facing Av al Marsa, or from Rue Bazo within the kasbah itself • Free
The grounds of the old palace (now the Musée des Oudaïa) contain a formal Andalusian Garden constructed by the French in the twentieth century. True to Andalusian tradition, it features deep, sunken beds of shrubs and flowering annuals. Historical authenticity aside, it’s a delightful place, full of the scent of fruit trees, daturas, bougainvillea and a multitude of herbs and flowers. It has a modern role too, as a meeting place for women, who gather here in small groups on a Friday or Sunday afternoon. On its north side is a small museum, dedicated in principle to jewellery, but it has been closed for some years for "restoration" and it is not clear when or whether it will reopen.
Oued Bou Regreg’s sandbank handicap
The guns of the forts and the plateforme in Rabat’s kasbah once regularly echoed across the estuary in Salé. The Oued Bou Regreg (“Father of Reflection River”) is quite open at this point and it would appear to have left the corsair fleets vulnerable, harboured a little downstream, where fishing boats today ferry people across to Salé. In fact, a long sandbank lies submerged across the mouth of the estuary – a feature much exploited by the shallow-keeled pirate ships, which would draw the merchant ships in pursuit, only to leave them stranded within the sights of the city’s cannon. The sandbank proved a handicap in the early twentieth century and diverted commercial trade to the better-endowed Casablanca.
Accessed from Av al Marsa or via a set of steep steps from the kasbah’s plateforme
Rabat’s local beach is crowded throughout the summer, as is the Salé strip across the water, though neither is very inviting, and you’d be better off at the more relaxed (and less testosterone-charged) sands at the Plage des Nations or Temara Plage. However, there’s often a fun wave for bodysurfers, although stand-up surfers also manage to catch a few waves most days.
The most ambitious of all Almohad buildings, the now-ruined Hassan Mosque was, in its time, the second largest mosque in the Islamic world, outflanked only by the one in Smarra, Iraq. Though little remains today apart from its vast tower, or minaret, its sheer size still seems a novelty.
The mosque was begun in 1195 – the same period as Marrakesh’s Koutoubia and Seville’s Giralda – and was designed to be the centrepiece of Yacoub el Mansour’s new capital in celebration of his victory over the Spanish Christians at Alarcos, but construction seems to have been abandoned on his death in 1199. Its extent must always have seemed an elaborate folly – Morocco’s most important mosque, the Kairaouine in Fez, is less than half the Hassan’s size, but served a much greater population.
The mosque’s hall, roofed in cedar, was used until the Great Earthquake of 1755 (which destroyed central Lisbon) brought down its central columns. Never rebuilt, some of the columns have been partially restored and at least offer some sense of the building’s size. The imposing tower (“le Tour Hassan”) has remained standing, and dominates almost every view of the capital. Some 50m tall in its present state, it would probably have been around 80m if finished to normal proportions – a third again of the height of Marrakesh’s Koutoubia.
Facing the Hassan Tower – in an assertion of Morocco’s historical independence and continuity – is the Mausoleum of Mohammed V, begun on the king’s death in 1961 and inaugurated six years later. Hassan II and his brother, Moulay Abdellah, are buried here too, alongside their father.
The mausoleum was designed by Vietnamese architect Vo Toan. With zellij mosaics rising from a marble floor to a ceiling of hand-carved cedar wood and gold leaf, its spiralling designs pay homage to traditional Moroccan techniques. Visitors file past fabulously costumed royal guards (who are happy to be photographed) and Fez-topped security agents (who aren’t) to an interior balcony; the tomb of Mohammed V, carved from white onyx, lies below, an old scholar often squatting beside it, reading from the Koran.
French in construction, style and feel, the Ville Nouvelle provides the main focus of Rabat’s life, above all in the cafés and promenades of the broad, tree-lined Avenue Mohammed V. There’s a certain grandeur, too, in some of the Mauresque colonial public buildings around the main boulevards, which were built with as much desire to impress as those of any earlier epoch.
Rue du Caire; entrance at the side of the Bank al Maghrib • Charge; audio-guide (French and Arabic) available • 0537 216472
Numismatists will enjoy the modern and interesting Bank al-Maghreb Museum; it’s quite plush and very well laid out, with coins dating back to the Phoenicians and the Berber kingdom of Mauretania arranged in chronological order and accompanied by informative text via touch-screen computers. There’s also an exhibit housing over a hundred paper notes in slide-out display cases.
More or less complete sections of Yacoub el Mansour’s Almohad walls run right down from the kasbah to the Royal Palace and beyond – an extraordinary monument to El Mansour’s vision. Along their course four of the original gates survive. Three – Bab el Alou, Bab el Had and Bab Zaer – are very modest. The fourth, Bab er Rouah (Gate of the Wind), is on an entirely different scale, recalling, and in many ways rivalling, the Oudaïa. If you walk between Bab er Rouah and the much-restored Bab Zaer, you’ll pass a series of modern gates leading off to the vast enclosures of the Royal Palace – which is really more a collection of palaces, built mainly in the nineteenth century. To enter, you will need to register your passport in the office located through the second door on the left if you’re walking alongside the walls on Avenue Moulay Assan.
Av Moulay Hassan • Interior chambers are used for exhibitions • Free
Contained within a massive stone bastion, Bab er Rouah achieves the tension of movement – with its sun-like arches contained within a square of Koranic inscription – and a similar balance between simplicity and ornament as the Bab Oudaïa. The west side, approached from outside the walls, is the main facade, and must have been designed as a monumental approach to the city; the shallow-cut, floral relief between arch and square is arguably the finest anywhere in Morocco. Inside, you can appreciate the gate’s archetypal defensive structure – the three domed chambers aligned to force a sharp double turn.
Rabat’s Archeological Museum is the most important in Morocco. Although small – surprisingly so in a country which saw substantial Phoenician and Carthaginian settlement and three centuries of Roman rule – it houses an impressive collection of Roman-era bronzes.
The bronzes are displayed in a special annexe with a separate entrance; although included in the entry fee, it’s sometimes closed when the pieces are on loan to other museums. The artefacts date from the first and second centuries AD and were found mainly at the provincial capital of Volubilis (near Meknes), together with a few pieces from Chellah and the colonies of Banasa and Thamusida. Highlights include superb figures of a guard dog and a rider, and two magnificent portrait heads, reputedly those of Cato the Younger (Caton d’Utique) and Juba II – the last significant ruler of the Romanized Berber kingdoms of Mauretania and Numidia before the assertion of direct imperial rule. Both of these busts were found in the House of Venus at Volubilis.
Back in the main building, there are showcases on two floors; each contains finds from different digs, of little interest unless you have already visited the area – or plan to do so. Captions are in Moroccan Arabic and French only.
Cnr Av Yacoub Al Mansour & Bd Moussa Idn Nossair • Charge
The most beautiful of Moroccan ruins, Chellah is a startling sight as you emerge from the long avenues of the Ville Nouvelle. Walled and towered, it seems a much larger enclosure than the map suggests. The site has been uninhabited since 1154, when it was abandoned in favour of Salé across the Bou Regreg. But for almost a thousand years prior to that, Chellah (or Sala Colonia, as it was known) had been a thriving city and port, one of the last to sever links with the Roman Empire and the first to proclaim Moulay Idriss founder of Morocco’s original Arab dynasty. An apocryphal local tradition maintains that the Prophet himself also prayed at a shrine here.
Under the Almohads, the site was already a royal burial ground, but most of what you see today, including the gates and enclosing wall, is the legacy of “The Black Sultan”, Abou el Hassan (1331–51), the greatest of the Merenids. The main gate has turreted bastions creating an almost Gothic appearance. Its base is recognizably Almohad, but each element has become inflated, and the combination of simplicity and solidity has gone. The Kufic inscription above the gate is from the Koran and begins with the invocation: “I take refuge in Allah, against Satan.”
To your left if coming from the entrance, signposted “Site Antique”, are the main Roman ruins. They are of a small trading post dating from 200 BC onwards, are well signposted and include a forum, a triumphal arch, a Temple of Jupiter and a craftsmen’s quarter.
From the main gate, the Islamic ruins are down to the right, within an inner sanctuary approached along a broad path through half-wild gardens. The most prominent feature is a tall stone-and-tile minaret, a ludicrously oversized stork’s nest usually perched on its top. Indeed, Chellah as a whole is a good spot for birdwatching, especially in nesting season.
The sanctuary itself appears as a confusing cluster of tombs and ruins, but it’s essentially just two buildings: a mosque, commissioned by the second Merenid sultan, Abou Youssef (1258–86), and a zaouia, or mosque-monastery, added along with the enclosure walls by Abou el Hassan. You enter directly into the sahn, or courtyard, of Abou Youssef’s Mosque, a small and presumably private structure built as a funerary dedication. It is now in ruins, though you can make out the colonnades of the inner prayer hall with its mihrab to indicate the direction of prayer. To the right is its minaret, now reduced to the level of the mosque’s roof.
Behind, both in and outside the sanctuary enclosure, are scattered royal tombs – each aligned so that the dead may face Mecca to await the Call of Judgement. Abou Youssef’s tomb has not been identified, but you can find those of both Sultan Abou el Hassan and his wife Shams ed Douna (Morning Sun). El Hassan’s is contained within a kind of pavilion whose external wall retains its decoration, the darj w ktarf motif set above three small arches in a design very similar to that of the Hassan Tower. Shams ed Douna has only a tombstone – a long, pointed rectangle covered in a mass of verses from the Koran. A convert from Christianity, Shams was the mother of Abou el Hassan’s rebel son, Abou Inan, whose uprising led to the sultan’s death as a fugitive in the High Atlas during the winter of 1352.
The Zaouia is in a much better state of preservation than the sanctuary, its structure, like Abou el Hassan’s medersas, that of a long, central court enclosed by cells, with a smaller oratory or prayer hall at the end. There are fragments of zellij tilework on some of the colonnades and on the minaret, giving an idea of its original brightness, and there are traces, too, of the mihrab’s elaborate stucco decoration. Five-sided, the mihrab has a narrow passageway (now blocked with brambles) leading to the rear – built so that pilgrims might make seven circuits round it. This was once believed to give the equivalent merit of the hadj, the trip to Mecca: a tradition, with that of Mohammed’s visit, probably invented and propagated by the zaouia’s keepers to increase their revenue.
Rabat airport shuttle bus times
Monday From Rabat noon, 4.05pm & 6.30pm; from airport 2.20pm, 6.55pm & 9.20pm.
Tuesday From Rabat 1.25pm, 2.45pm, 3.45pm, 4.40pm, 5.50pm & 6.40pm; from airport 4.15pm, 5.35pm, 6.05pm, 7.05pm, 7.35pm 8.40pm & 9.30pm.
Wednesday From Rabat 3pm; from airport 5.20pm.
Thursday From Rabat 1pm, 3.40pm, 4.30pm, 5.30pm & 6.15m; from airport 3.20pm, 6.30pm, 7.05pm, 8.40pm & 9.15pm.
Friday From Rabat 11am, 4.05pm & 6.30pm; from airport noon, 1.20pm, 6.55pm & 9.20pm.
Saturday From Rabat 1.25pm, 2.45pm, 3.15pm, 4.20pm, 5.50pm & 6.35pm; from airport 4.15pm, 5.25pm, 5.35pm, 7.05pm, 7.35pm 8.40pm & 9.25pm.
Sunday From Rabat noon; from airport 2.20pm.
Off to the right and above the sanctuary enclosure are a group of koubbas – the domed tombs of local saints or marabouts – and beyond them a spring pool, enclosed by low, vaulted buildings. This is held sacred, along with the eels which swim in its waters, and women bring hard-boiled eggs for the fish to invoke assistance in fertility and childbirth.
At the far end of the sanctuary, you can look down a side valley to the Bou Regreg estuary. From here, you can appreciate that this site was destined, from early times, to be settled and fortified. The site was easy to defend and the springs provided water in times of siege.
If you’re here in spring, you’ll see hundreds of flowers in bloom as well as birdlife, with storks nesting and the egrets roosting. The site is rarely busy except on Fridays, when Moroccans are admitted for free – families come to spend the day in the gardens, and children play among the ruins. The annual Jazz au Chellah festival takes place here over five days each September, with the 1500-seat capacity often sold out each night.
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Cnr avs Moulay Hassan & Allal Ben Abdallah • Charge • museemohammed6.ma
Opened in October 2014 after a decade of planning, with backing from the king himself and at a reported cost of over 200 million dirhams, the strikingly all-white Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is a work of art in itself. A number of permanent and temporary exhibitions cover the multi-levelled interior, and there’s also an auditorium, art restoration laboratory, library and café. Information accompanying the works is exclusively in French and Moroccan Arabic.
By plane Rabat–Salé airport (onda.ma/Nos-Aéroports/Aéroport-Rabat-Salé) is 7km northeast of the city and served by a shuttle bus and grands taxis. The shuttle bus (45min), operated by Stareo, travels between the airport and a nondescript bus parking bay opposite Rabat Ville train station, on Av Mohammed V. The current tariff is 20dh one way, and the timetable is somewhat complicated, to say the least. A sign in the terminal displays the official rates for grands taxis (up to six people) The modern terminal has bureaux de change and ATMs, plus car rental desks, which include Avis (0537 831198) and Europcar (0537 724141). The airport serves only international flights, mainly to Brussels, Madrid, London and Paris. Air France’s office is at 281 Av Mohammed V, just north of Hôtel Balima (0537 707580).
By train Rabat Ville train station is right in the middle of the Ville Nouvelle, a few minutes’ walk from many hotels. On street level are two banks with ATMs and Budget car rental (0537 705789). Rabat Agdal station serves the southern suburbs and the Royal Palace.
Destinations Asilah (8 direct & 2 connecting daily; 3–4hr); Casablanca Port (6.30am–9pm 1–2 hourly; 1hr); Casa Voyageurs (26 daily; 1hr 10min); Casablanca Mohammed V airport (5.15am–7.45pm 1–3 connecting hourly; 2hr–2hr 30min); Fez (19 daily; 2hr 30min–3hr 10min); Kenitra (1–3 hourly; 35min); Marrakesh (9 direct & 3 connecting daily; 4hr 25min–5hr 10min); Meknes (19 daily; 2hr–2hr 30min); Oujda (2 direct & 1 connecting daily; 10hr); Tangier (8 direct & 2 connecting daily; 3hr 35min– 5hr 30min).
By bus Rabat’s main bus station, Gare Routière Kamra is on Bd Hassan II (the N1 highway), 3km southwest of the centre. CTM operates from its own station 400m further southwest along Bd Hassan II. Local buses ply the route between the bus station and Bab el Had (bus #30 picks up right outside the terminal, buses #17 and #41 stop just behind it), or you can get a petit taxi (around 20dh). The closest tramway stop is Ibn Rochd (Line 1), on Pl Ibn Iznassen about 1.5km southeast along Av Ibn Rochd.
Destinations Agadir (7 CTM & over 10 others daily; 9–10hr); Al Hoceima (2 CTM daily; 9–10hr); Casablanca (over 20 CTM & very frequent others daily; 1hr 30min); Chefchaouen (1 CTM & 2 others daily; 5hr); Essaouira (over 10 daily; 8hr 30min); Fez (17 CTM daily & others hourly 5am–7pm; 3hr 30min); El Jadida (over 10 daily; 4hr); Marrakesh (10 CTM daily & others hourly; 4hr 30min–6hr); Meknes (14 CTM daily & others hourly; 2hr 30min); Nador (2 CTM & over 5 others daily; 9hr); Ouarzazate (1 CTM & 5 others daily; 9hr 30min); Safi (8 daily; 6hr); Tangier (7 CTM and over 10 others daily; 4–5hr); Oujda (5 CTM & 2 others daily; 9hr 30min); Tetouan (7 CTM & over 10 others daily; 5–6hr).
By grand taxi Shared grands taxis between Rabat and Casablanca operate from just outside the main bus station. Those for Fez, Meknes and Salé congregate at the Shell petrol station on Bd Hassan II, next to Hôtel Bou Regreg and opposite Bab Chellah.
Destinations Casablanca (1hr 20min); Fez (2hr 30min); Meknes (1hr 50min); Salé (15min).
By bus While the tram is the easiest way to get around Rabat, there are a few local bus services that can still be very useful.
By tram A modern, a/c tram system (daily 6am–10pm; tram-way.ma) links Rabat and Salé. Line 1 runs east to west via Agdal and both Rabat Ville and Salé train stations, while Line 2 runs northwest to southeast via Bd Hassan II and Salé bus station. Both cross the Oued Bou Regreg and stop near Rabat’s Hassan Mosque and Salé’s Bab Mrissa. Tickets cost 6dh and can be purchased from ticket vendors at each station or on-board conductors. The ticket allows 1hr travel from the time of your first in-tram validation, provided no two journeys (in either direction) are the same.
By taxi Petits and grands taxis can be found on Bd Hassan II and by the train station; petits taxis are not allowed to run between Rabat and Salé.
By car In addition to the offices at the airport and train station (see above), car rental companies in town include: Avis, 7 Rue Abou Faris al Marini (0537 721818); Europcar, 25 bis Rue Patrice Lumumba (0537 722328).
Tourist information The Conseil Régional du Tourisme have a website at visitrabat.com.
Accommodationmap
Hotel space can be tight in midsummer, and especially July, when budget-priced rooms in particular are at a premium, so it’s a good idea to book ahead. A couple of cheapies aside, most of the better hotels are in the Ville Nouvelle.
Al Maghrib al Jadid 2 Rue Sebbahi 0537 732207. Basic and clean, though the decor is a garish combination of candy-pink and bright blue. Hot showers are available in the morning only (extra charge). The owners also run the Hôtel Marrakech, down the street at no.10, with exactly the same prices and colour scheme. €
Dorhmi 313 Av Mohammed V 0537 723898. Family owned and managed, and nicely positioned, just inside Bab el Djedid. The clean and simple first-floor rooms open inwards to a central courtyard, though there’s no common sitting area. Separate hot shower (extra charge) and squat toilet. €
Note that the services departing from around Bab el Had are heavily used by locals and the ensuing noise and confusion often requires a steady head to both locate your desired service and successfully embark the bus.
#2 from opposite Bab el Had to the intercity bus station.
#3 from just by Rabat Ville train station down Avenue Fal Ould Ouemir in Agdal to Avenue Atlas.
#9 from opposite Bab el Had to Salé, Jardins Exotiques, Museé Dar Belghazi and the Plage des Nations turn-off.
#12 and #13 from just off Place Melilla to Salé.
#33 from opposite Bab el Had to Temara Plage.
#35 from Avenue Allal Ben Abdallah to Salé and Magic Park.
Riad el Maâti 15 Rue Sidi el Maâti riadelmaati.com. Meticulously restored by the French-Moroccan owner-managers, this riad has whitewashed walls throughout and high-ceilinged rooms that are simply but very tastefully furnished, with modern, spacious bathrooms. Meals are served in a dining room with fireplace or on the wide rooftop terrace, accessible (as is one of the rooms) by wheelchair thanks to that Medina rarity – a lift. BB €€€€
Bélère 33 Av Moulay Youssef belere-hotels.com. This is a comfortable, well-positioned hotel with impressive management and friendly staff. The rooms exude a touch of luxury with soft, neutral tones throughout, plush carpeted floors, spacious marble bathrooms, and heavy curtains to soften the outside street noise. The larger suites also have a small sitting area and balcony, plus there are a couple of restaurants (the breakfast buffet can often disappoint), a piano bar and a nightclub. BB €€€€
Caleche d’Or 11 Av Moulay Youssef 0537 701319. Across the road from Rabat Ville station and with a good selection of cafés and restaurants close by, this is one of the city’s better two-star options. Accessed from a steep marbled staircase, the tiled rooms are bright and clean with a/c, sparkling modern bathrooms and satellite TV. €€
Capitol 34 Av Allal Ben Abdallah 0537 731236. One of the more modern two-star options in the city centre and about a 10min walk from Rabat Ville station. Accessed by a handy lift, all rooms are tiled with their own bathroom and satellite TV; those overlooking the busy street offer a balcony, while those at the rear are quieter and better value. A first-floor restaurant offers a menu of Moroccan standards and room service. €€
Central 2 Rue Al Basra 0537 707356. One of the better cheapies, conveniently located for restaurants, banks and Rabat Ville station. Most rooms have patterned colonial floor tiles and some have showers (otherwise they’re 10dh), with hot water mornings and evenings only. €
Gaulois Cnr Rue Hims & Av Mohammed V 0537 723022. Friendly old hotel with a spacious grand entrance and balustraded stairway. While not exactly ageing graciously, it’s still pretty good value for money. There’s guarded parking (30dh) out front. €
Majestic 121 Bd Hassan II hotelmajestic.ma. This long-established hotel, accessed by a flight of stairs, offers rather characterless but bright and clean rooms; some overlook the Medina, but these can also be noisy. Limited guarded parking is available. €€
Malak Pl Melilla malakhotel.com. One of the better mid-range options, located a short walk from Bab Chellah. The contemporary styled rooms are simply but tastefully furnished, with spacious modern bathrooms – request a room facing away from busy Pl Melilla. A ground-level café-restaurant offers a basic breakfast as well as an all-day menu of Moroccan standards. BB €€
El Mamounia 10 Rue Mamounia 0537 724479. A three-floor climb but rewarded with a good-value cheapie, homely in a slightly kitsch kind of way. Hot showers (shared) are extra. €
Royal Cnr Rue Amman & Av Allal Ben Abdallah royalhotelrabat.morocco-ma.website/fr. A long-standing mid-range hotel with comfortable and reasonable rooms – not huge, but refurbished, clean and well maintained. The best ones overlook the attractive Parc du Triangle de Vue. BB €€
Sofitel Rabat Jardin des Roses Cnr avs Doustour & Imam Malik, Souissi sofitel.com. The rooms in this deluxe five-star have a modern designer touch with all the mod cons you’d expect for the price, and all have a balcony overlooking the vast gardens or the city. Located in the suburb of Souissi just beyond the royal palace, it’s a 10min petit taxi drive from the Medina. BB €€€€
Splendid 8 Rue Ghazza 0537 723283. Another budget traveller’s favourite, this friendly old hotel centres on a pleasant courtyard with flowers and banana trees. The rooms are high-ceilinged and fairly simple but functional, with firm mattresses and big, old wardrobes; some come with a sink while others have their own showers (hot water evenings only). €
Velleda 106 Av Allal Ben Abdallah 0537 769531. Located on the fifth floor (fortunately there’s a lift), the rooms here are pretty basic but clean, with tiled floors, small bathrooms, TV and a desk. The staff are friendly and the location is good, with a ground-floor café and convenience store. €
For a capital city, Rabat is pretty quiet, but it does have some excellent restaurants – many of them moderately priced or inexpensive – plus loads of good cafés. As ever, the cheapest places to eat are in the Medina, just inside the walls on Av Mohammed V.
El Bahia Bab el Bouiba, 4 Bd Hassan II. Standard Moroccan fare such as tajines, kebabs and salads, in a pleasant courtyard, upstairs or on the pavement outside, though service can be slow. €
Café Maure Rue Bazo, Kasbah. Adjoining the kasbah’s Andalusian Garden is this small shaded terrace-café. It’s a great spot to take a break and look out over the river mouth and beyond to Salé. Tea and coffee are on offer, and there are cakes too. €
Café Taghazoute 7 Rue Sebbahi. This clean and airy café serves simple dishes, including delicious fried fish, plus decent omelettes which makes it a good option for breakfast. It tends to be busy with office workers at lunchtime. €
Dinarjat 6 Rue Belgnaoui, off Bd el Alou dinarjat.ma. This palatial restaurant with fine Moroccan dishes and musical entertainment, in a seventeenth-century mansion at the northern end of the Medina, makes a good affordable choice if you wish to spoil yourself). Licensed. €€€
Libération 256 Av Mohammed V. One of the city’s better budget restaurants, with generous portions of couscous every day. Downstairs offers good people watching while upstairs is quieter and has more seating. €€
Le Ziryab 10 Impasse Ennajar, signposted from Rue des Consuls, restaurantleziryab.com. Very popular among execs, diplomats and politicians, with good reason: the five-course menu is first-class Moroccan fare. Add the accompaniment of traditional music and the exquisite interior, and this is worth a special treat. Ask for a lantern-led escort from the Medina entrance, and come hungry – each course is almost a meal in itself. Licensed. €€€€
La Bamba 3 Rue Tanta, a small side street behind the Hôtel Balima. Serving up European and Moroccan dishes, as well as good-value three-course set menus, in a pleasant space and accompanied by good service. Licensed. €€
Casa José 279 Bd Mohammed V www.legrandcomptoir.ma. A classy and spacious tapas bar, with a small range of good tapas, mainly seafood-based, to accompany your beer or wine, as well as more substantial courses if you want them. €€
La Koutoubia 10 Rue Pierre Parent, off Rue Moulay Abdelaziz. Home to a bar and, with a separate entrance through a quaint wood-and-glass extension, an old-style 1950s restaurant, serving excellent Moroccan dishes; try the honeyed lamb and almond tajine. The service – watched over by an English-speaking patron who’s been there from the beginning – is very good. Licensed. €€
La Mamma 6 Rue Tanta. A typically dark and cosy pizzeria, with a varied menu of Italian classics including wood-fired pizza and char-grilled meats. Next door is La Dolce Vita (same hours), owned by the same patron and offering luscious Italian-style ice cream. Licensed. €
La Pagode 13 Rue Baghdad. La Pagode has been around for a while now and remains one of the more popular Asian restaurants in town, with a large menu of mainly Chinese and Vietnamese dishes, and sushi too. They also have a takeaway and delivery service. Licensed. €€
Tajine wa Tanjia 9 Rue Baghdad. Little restaurant with a pleasant atmosphere, accompanied most nights by live oud playing. The menu is mainly well-presented Moroccan food of a consistently high standard, with a range of tajines (including vegetarian), tanjia (jugged beef or lamb), and couscous on FriLicensed. €€
Ty Potes 11 Rue Ghafsa typotes.com. A very popular French deli-bistro with a cosy non-smoking interior (with wi-fi) or leafy, pleasant courtyard, serving up light meals (galettes, crêpes, tartines) as well as items from a daily blackboard menu. The deli offers a wide selection of cheeses, cured meats, jams and sauces, and the drinks menu includes cider. Reservations recommended. Licensed. €€
On the beachfront below the Kasbah des Oudaïas are two popular seafood restaurants, accessed via a path from the kasbah’s plateforme or by a short side road off Av al Marsa. Both are licensed and offer great sea views.
Borj Eddar Plage de Rabat borjeddar.com. Set within seventeenth-century walls and popular with tour groups, this classy restaurant offers a menu that is surprisingly good value. Besides the expected plethora of seafood dishes, including a tummy-stretching platter for two; there’s also a good choice of meat tajines and couscous. €€€€
De la Plage Plage de Rabat. Perhaps the less fancy of the two beach restaurants, though the menu still offers a wide choice of fish, mostly priced by weight and all of it rather average in quality. But the view over the water is astounding. €€€
Drinking and nightlifemap
The city’s nightlife is pretty sedate. Outside of the main hotels and restaurants, bars are few and far between, while many nightclubs, notably those around Pl de Melilla, are little more than pick-up joints, though you’ll need to dress up to get in.
Amnesia 18 Rue de Monastir, facebook.com/AmnesiaRabat. This American-themed club pumps out a mix of Euro and Arabic pop but rarely gets very full.
El Palatino 133 Av Allal Ben Abdallah. Very popular Spanish-style tapas bar. The in-house DJs know their stuff and there’s nightly drink specials as well as regular themed parties, such as Karaoke Mondays. Good fun without too much pretentiousness.
Shopping map
Limited but rewarding shopping opportunities are on offer in both the Medina and kasbah, as shops stock all the same handicrafts as those in Marrakesh and Fez. The relative lack of hassle and hard bargaining makes shopping here quite pleasant.
Rue des Consuls Medina. The Medina’s main tourist street, with shops selling handicrafts from other parts of Morocco, such as leatherwork from Marrakesh and pottery from Fez, along with some locally made items such as lamps and carpets. Rabat used to be a major producer and seller of carpets, and there’s still a carpet auction held on Rue des Consuls every Mon and Thurs morning.
Rue Souk as Sabbat Medina. A covered extension of Rue Souika, this short stretch houses a number of small shops selling jewellery, jellabas, babouches and musical instruments.
Banks & exchange Most are along avs Allal Ben Abdallah and Mohammed V. BMCE, 340 Av Mohammed V has a bureau de change (daily 8am–8pm), and two ATMs. Bureaux de change include Currency Exchange Point, Av Moulay Youssef between hotels Bélère and Caleche d’Or and WafaCash, cnr Av Mohammed V & Rue Ghaza. CIH bank, 4 Av Maghreb el Arabi, has a foreign exchange ATM.
Doctors and hospitals Dr Youssef Alaoui Belghiti, 6 Pl des Alaouites (0537 708029); Dr Mohammed el Kabbaj, 8 Rue Oued Zem (0537 764311); Dr Taghride Jamaleddine Harou (Female, English-speaking), 2nd floor, 2 Av Allal Ben Abdallah (0537 734739). For emergencies call the Service Médical d’Urgence on 0537 737373.
Embassies Algeria, 46 Bd Tariq Ibn Ziad (0537 767668); Canada, 66 Av Mehdi Ben Barka, Souissi (0537 544949, morocco.gc.ca); Mauritania, 6 Rue Thami Lamdouar, Souissi (0537 656678); South Africa, 34 Rue des Saadiens (0537 689163, gov.za); UK, 28 Av SAR Sidi Mohammed, Souissi (0537 633333, www.gov.uk/world/organisations/british-embassy-rabat); US, Km 5.7, Av Mohamed VI, Souissi (0537 637200, usembassy.gov/morocco). Australia is represented by the Canadian embassy. The nearest Irish representation is in Casablanca.
Festivals Festival Mawazine (“Festival of Rhythms”; mawazine.ma) runs over 7–10 days each June in a number of venues around the city, including the Théâtre National Mohammed V, Rabat’s riverside promenade, and Salé beach. The nightly performances usually cover a wide range of genres, from classical Andalusian to Arabic pop and Western rock. Jazz au Chellah , a joint effort between the EU and Morocco, takes place over 5 days sometime between June and Sept. Performances take place each evening at the Chellah.
Golf The Dar es Salaam Royal Golf Club, 9km out of Rabat on Zaers Rd (www.royalgolfdaressalam.com) is one of the country’s finest, with two eighteen-hole and one nine-hole courses designed by Robert Trent-Jones.
Pharmacies Renaissance, 352 Av Mohammed V, just north of the post office.
Police The main station is on Av Tripoli, near the cathedral (0537 720231), with a police post at Bab Djedid and another on Rue des Consuls, and one in the kasbah.
Post office Cnr avs Mohammed V and Jean Jaurès, opposite the Bank Al Maghrib.
Though now essentially a suburb of Rabat, SALÉ was the pre-eminent of the two right through the Middle Ages, from the decline of the Almohads to the pirate republic of Bou Regreg. Under the Merenids, as a port of some stature, it was endowed with monuments such as its superb Medersa Bou Inan.
Zaouias, moussems and marabouts
Round Salé’s Grand Mosque, and over to the northwest, you can view (but only enter if you are Muslim) a trio of interesting buildings.
The first is the Zaouia Sidi Ahmed el Tijani, founder of the Tijaniyya Sufi order and whose elaborate portal faces the Grand Mosque and Medersa. Zaouias are a mix of shrine and charitable establishment, maintained by their followers, who once a year or more hold a moussem, a pilgrimage festival, in the saint-founder’s honour.
The most important of Salé’s moussems is the “wax moussem” of its patron saint, Sidi Abdallah Ben Hassoun, whose zaouia stands at the end of the Rue de la Grande Mosquée, by the cemetery. His moussem, held on the eve of Mouloud (the Prophet’s birthday;), involves a spectacular procession through the Medina with candle bearers (a hereditary position) carrying huge and elaborate wax candles in the form of lanterns mounted on giant poles, followed by various brotherhoods, dancing and playing music. The procession starts about 3pm and culminates early evening at the zaouia; the best place to see it is at Bab Bou Haja.
At the far end of a cemetery (again forbidden to non-Muslims), which spreads down to the river, is a third revered site, the white koubba of the Marabout of Sidi Ben Achir. Sometimes known as “Al Tabib” (The Doctor), Ben Achir was a fourteenth-century ascetic from Andalusia. His shrine reputedly effects cures for blindness, paralysis and madness. Enclosed by nineteenth-century pilgrim lodgings, it also has a considerable annual moussem on the eve of Mouloud.
In the twentieth century, after the French made Rabat their capital and Casablanca their main port, Salé became a bit of a backwater. The original Ville Nouvelle was just a small area around the bus station and the northern gates, but recent developments have changed this, with a major project, Bou Regreg Marina, continuing to take shape on the riverbank.
Salé is a centre for pottery, and its plain ceramic tajines are – for practical rather than aesthetic purposes – the best in the country.
For the most part, Salé still looks and feels very different from Rabat, particularly within its Medina walls, where the souks and life remain surprisingly traditional. Lacking any great “attractions” as such, there are few tourists – all the more reason to visit.
The most interesting point to enter Salé’s Medina is through Bab Mrisa, near the grand taxi terminal. Its name – “of the small harbour” – recalls the marine arsenal that used to be sited within the walls, and explains the gate’s unusual height. A channel running here from the Bou Regreg has long silted up, but in medieval times it allowed merchant ships to sail right into town. The gate itself is a very early Merenid structure of the 1270s, its design and motifs (palmettes enclosed by floral decoration, bands of Kufic inscription and darj w ktarf) still inherently Almohad in tone.
Inside Bab Mrisa you’ll find yourself in a small square, at the bottom of the old Mellah (Jewish quarter). Turning to the left and continuing close to the walls for around 350m, you come to another gate, Bab Bou Haja, beside a small park. If you want to explore the souks via the route outlined below, veer right and take the road which runs along the left-hand side of the park (Rue Bab el Khebaz). If not, continue on just inside the walls to a long open area; as this starts to narrow into a lane (about 40m further down), veer to your right into the town. This should bring you out more or less at the Grand Mosque, opposite which is the Medersa Abou el Hassan.
The park-side street from Bab Bou Haja is Rue Bab el Khebaz (Street of the Bakers’ Gate), a busy little lane that emerges at the heart of the souks by a small kissaria (covered market) devoted mainly to textiles. Most of the alleys here are grouped round specific crafts – a particular speciality is the pattern-weave mats produced for the sides and floors of mosques, which you can find in the Souk el Merzouk. There is also a wool souk, the Souk el Ghezel, while wood, leather, ironware, carpets and household items are in the Souk el Kebir – the grand souk.
Close by the kissaria is a fourteenth-century hospice, the Fondouk Askour, with a notable gateway (built by Abou Inan), and beyond this, the Medina’s main street, Rue de la Grande Mosquée, leads uphill through the middle of town to the Grand Mosque. This is the simplest approach, but you can take in more of the souks by following the parallel Rue Kechachin. Along here are the carpenters and stone-carvers, as well as other craftsmen. On Rue Haddadin, a fairly major intersection which leads off to its right up towards Bab Sebta, you’ll come upon gold- and coppersmiths.
Rue de la Grande Mosquée • Gateway and minaret open access; prayer hall and mihrab closed to non-Muslims
The area around the Grand Mosque is the most interesting part of town, with lanes fronting a concentration of aristocratic mansions and religious zaouia foundations. Almohad in origin, the mosque is one of the largest and earliest in Morocco. Unfortunately, non-Muslims can only see the gateway and minaret, which are recent additions, though Muslims can enter to see the prayer hall and mihrab, which are original.
Rue de la Grande Mosquée • Charge
Everybody can visit the restored Medersa Abou el Hassan, opposite the mosque’s monumental, stepped main entrance. The medersa was founded in 1341 by Sultan Abou el Hassan, and is thus more or less contemporary with the Bou Inania medersas in Meknes and Fez. Like them (though rather smaller), it is intensely decorated with carved wood, stucco and zellij, leaving hardly an inch of space that doesn’t draw the eye into a web of intricacy.
The patterns, for the most part, derive from Almohad models, with their stylized geometric and floral motifs, but in the latter there is a much more naturalistic, less abstracted approach. There is also a new stress on calligraphy, with monumental inscriptions carved in great bands on the dark cedar wood and incorporated within the stucco and zellij. Almost invariably these are in the elaborate cursive script and are generally passages from the Koran.
Close to its entrance there is a stairway up to the former cells of the students (now partially renovated to look almost liveable) and to the roof, where, looking out across the river to Rabat, you sense the enormity of the Hassan Tower.
By train The train station is conveniently located just across the N1 highway from the Medina’s eastern walls.
Destinations Asilah (8 direct & 2 connecting daily; 2hr 45min); Casa Port (1–2 hourly 6.17am–8.40pm; 1hr 20min); Casa Voyageurs (1–2 hourly 4.59am–10.30pm; 1hr 15min); Rabat (1–2 hourly 4.59am–9.47pm; 15min); Tangier (8 direct & 2 connecting daily; 3hr 30min–5hr 30min).
By tram The easiest way to travel between Salé and Rabat is by the tramway (tram-way.ma). Both lines cross the Oued Bou Regreg, stopping at the Hassan Mosque and Tower in Rabat and opposite Bab Mrisa in Salé. Line 1 also calls at both Rabat Ville and Salé train stations.
By bus The gare routière is 1km east of the Medina, a short walk from Hassan II tramway station (Line 2). Long-distance services are restricted to those listed below; CTM buses don’t stop in Salé. Regular city buses run between the eastern end of Bd Hassan II in Rabat and the grand taxi station in Salé.
Destinations Casablanca (over 10 daily; 2hr); Kenitra (over 20 daily; 45min); Tangier (2 daily; 4hr 30min).
By grand taxi Grands taxis from the Shell petrol station on Bd Hassan II in Rabat, opposite Bab Chellah, will usually drop off at Bab Bou Haja or Bab Mrisa on the way to Salé’s grand taxi station opposite Bab Lekhmiss.
Accommodation map and this map
Le Dawliz Av du Bouregreg hoteldawlizrabat.ma. To the east of the Medina and overlooking the river, this top-end hotel offers large rooms and suites with all mod cons, plus a complex of bars, restaurants and a nightclub. €€€€
The Repose 17 Zankat Talaa, Ras Chejra, Medina therepose.com. The first and still the best riad in the Medina, with four individually decorated suites, some with a fireplace. The service and attention is impeccable, as are the in-house meals with locally sourced, often organic, ingredients. Traditional experiences can be arranged, such as a visit to the local hammam or henna hand painting. BB €
Eating and drinkingmap
In the evening, you can eat in the Medina at one of the many snack cafés along Rue Kechachin, but by 10pm the streets are often empty and shops and cafés closed. The opposite is the case at the marina, where there’s a selection of café-restaurants that stay open till late.
Le Marco 2 Av de Fes, Marina marco.ma. Opened in 2015, this has rapidly become one of the places to dine in Salé. Styled as a French brasserie, the classy interior includes an open-to-view kitchen as well as a children’s play corner, while the outdoor terrace offers wonderful river views. The cuisine is largely top-end but there are also some cheaper salads and sandwiches, and the service is genuinely friendly. Licensed. €€€
Between Rabat and Casablanca lie a number of sandy beaches, popular with locals from both cities, especially during the summer holiday months. Apartment complexes are steadily taking over large tracts of the coastline here, supplying an increasing demand for city workers willing to commute.
Temara Ville is on the Rabat–Casa Port train line (6.30am–8pm 2 hourly), and petits taxis will take you from the train station to the beach for 10dh; the beach is served by bus #17 from outside Bab el Had in Rabat, and in summer grands taxis make the journey from Bd Hassan II
Thirteen kilometres south of Rabat, the town of Temara is notable primarily for its small kasbah, which dates from Moulay Ismail’s reign during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, most visitors come here for its beach, Temara Plage, 4km west of town. Packed in summer and deserted for the rest of the year, it’s a pleasant if slightly wild stretch of golden sand. The sea here offers the odd wave for surfers but only confident swimmers should venture out past the breakers.
Formerly known as Fedala but renamed following the death of Mohammed V in 1961, the port of MOHAMMEDIA has a dual identity, as the site of Morocco’s main oil refineries and the base of its petrochemical industry, but also as a holiday playground for Casablanca, with one of the best beaches on the Atlantic, a racecourse and a royal golf club.
The Royal Palace at Skhirat Plage, between Rabat and Mohammedia, was the site of a coup attempt by Moroccan generals during King Hassan II’s birthday celebrations in July 1971. The coup was mounted using a force of Berber cadets, who took over the palace, imprisoned the king and killed a number of his guests. It was thwarted by the apparently accidental shooting of the cadets’ leader, General Mohammed Medbuh, and by the strength of personality of Hassan, who reasserted control over his captors. Among the guests who survived was Malcolm Forbes. The palace still stands, though it has understandably fallen from royal favour.
With its friendly, easy-going atmosphere, pleasant palm-lined streets and a fine selection of restaurants, Mohammedia makes an enjoyable stopover, or a base for Casablanca. Between the train station and the Ville Nouvelle, there is a small square kasbah, built during a period of Portuguese occupation and still preserving its original gateway.
Arrival and departure Mohammedia
By train The modern train station is on the southeast edge of the town, just under 2km from the downtown hotels and restaurants. A petit taxi to the station from the centre should cost 10dh.
Destinations Casa Port (7.15am–9.37pm 1–2 hourly; 25min); Casa Voyageurs (5.55am–10.39pm 1–3 hourly; 25min); Rabat (6.14am–10,55pm 1–2 hourly; 45min).
By bus Long-distance buses operate from the gare routière, just off Av Hassan II and a 10min walk from the train station; CTM buses don’t stop in Mohammedia. Local buses travelling the 30km to Casablanca depart from Av Hassan II, just in front of the train station; the best bus to take is #900, which stops on Av des FAR, near Pl Zellaqa (hourly 8am–7pm).
By grand taxi Grands taxis to and from Av des FAR in Casablanca operate from Av Hassan II, opposite the train station.
Destination Casablanca (30min).
Accommodationmap
Avanti Mohammedia Bd Moulay Youssef avantimohammedia.com. Formerly known as L’Amphitrite Beach, this large top-end complex is on the beachfront, with over 150 rooms and suites, all with balconies but not all with ocean views. There is a choice of restaurants and bars, as well as a decent-sized swimming pool, gym, uber-trendy nightclub and a pretty good spa that usually requires advance booking. BB €€€€
Camping l’Ocean Bleu 4km north of town on the R322 coast road towards Rabat 0660 911922. Friendly, family-run beachfront campsite with shaded pitches for tents and camper vans, as well as a few simple bungalows. Basic food provisions are available all year, and there’s a restaurant in summer. Limited wi-fi. €
La Falaise Rue Farhat Hachad 0523 324828. A basic but clean and friendly little place, with twelve spotless rooms (only one is en suite but all have a hand basin) facing inwards to a tree-shaded central courtyard. There’s a popular, at times noisy, bar next door. Reservations recommended. €
Fedala 6 Av Abderrahmane Sarghini hotelfedala.com. A busy yet welcoming mid-range hotel across from the kasbah. The rooms are comfortable, despite suffering slightly from a garish over-the-top Moroccan theme, with lots of bright colour, intricate headboards and large, heavy drapes. There’s a number of public areas. BB €€
Hager 3 Rue Farhat Hachad 0523 325921. Modest and faded hotel, with a rooftop restaurant and a bar. The tiled rooms are a bit spartan but clean and spacious, plus there are a few tired suites that have large sitting rooms. There’s a small but welcome lift to cover the three floors. BB €€
Eating and drinking map
For its size, Mohammedia’s choice of restaurants is impressive, especially for fish. Breakfast and snacks are available from a number of cafés looking onto the pleasant, grassed Parc des Ville Jumelées or at the eastern end of the beachfront promenade.
Big Bamboo Av Hassan II (1km NW of the train station) bamboopub.ma. A very popular and unpretentious bar-restaurant with a number of seating areas both inside and out, including an “Irish corner” complete with big-screen TV for live football. The Asian-European menu includes stir-fries and a very good filet de bœuf, and there’s often live music and salsa dancing. €€
La Francaise des Saveurs 1 Rue Farhat Hachad. Open since 1947 but looking sleek and modern from a twenty-first-century facelift, this classy patisserie also doubles as the downtown bakery. Along with a good selection of breads and pastries (15–28dh), there’s always a tempting display of chocolate creations that can be gift-boxed should you wish. €
La Frégate Rue Oued Zem. Come here for rock lobster, prawns and all manner of seafood in generous helpings, particularly with shellfish paella. There’s a takeaway and delivery service too. Licensed. €€€
La Gaufrette Av Mohammed Zerktouni. One of the better cafés looking onto Parc de Mohammedia, female-friendly and with a pleasant and shaded pavement area along with more formal seating inside. A choice of breakfast options is accompanied by a snack menu offering sandwiches and pizza A good spot to while away a few hours of people watching. €€
Hôtel Hager 3 Rue Farhat Hachad. This hotel’s two restaurants are both worth a visit. The rooftop one offers a varied menu that leans towards seafood but also offers standards such as a lamb tajine or chicken brochettes, accompanied by ocean glimpses and a welcoming breeze during summer. The ground-floor bar offers beer and tapas. Licensed. €€
La Peche Rue Farhat Hachad. Unpretentious and popular seafood restaurant serving some of the best calamari, fish, oysters and cheap paella in town. There’s also a few other options, including pizza. Can get very busy on Sun with well-to-do Casablancans enjoying their weekly seafood feast. €
Du Port 1 Rue du Port restoport.ma. One of the classiest restaurants along the coast, with nautical decor inside and an outdoor upper deck sporting ocean views. Renowned for its charcoal grills, it isn’t cheap but the food is inventive and accompanying sauces delicious. Seafood is the obvious menu-filler, with dishes such as roasted monkfish medallions with mushrooms, though meat-fans are also accommodated – there are plenty of steak options. Reservations recommended on weekends. Licensed. €€€€
Banks Attijariwafa Bank, Banque Populaire & SGMB are all on Av Hassan II, about 500m southwest of the train station. Attijariwafa Bank also has a couple of other branches along Av des FAR. The post office has an ATM.
Golf Mohammedia Royal Golf Club, Bd des Zanata (rgam.ma).
Post office Av Mohammed Zerktouni, facing Parc des Ville Jumelées, and at Av Hassan II, opposite the train station.
Morocco’s biggest city and commercial capital, CASABLANCA (Dar el Baïda in Arabic) is the Maghreb’s largest port, and busier than Marseilles, on which it was modelled by the French. Its development, from a town of 20,000 in 1906, has been astonishing, but ruthlessly deliberate. When the French landed their forces here in 1907, and established their Protectorate five years later, Fez was Morocco’s commercial centre and Tangier its main port. Had Tangier not been in international hands, this probably would have remained the case. However, the demands of an independent colonial administration forced the French to seek an entirely new base. Casa, at the heart of Maroc Utile, the country’s most fertile zone and centre of its mineral deposits, was a natural choice.
Superficially, with a population of over three million, Casa today is not unlike a large southern European city. Arriving here from the south, or even from Fez or Tangier, most of the preconceptions you’ve been travelling round with will be happily shattered by the city’s cosmopolitan beach clubs or by the almost total absence of the veil. But these “European” images shield what is substantially a first-generation city – and one still attracting considerable immigration from the countryside – and perhaps inevitably some of Morocco’s most intense social problems.
Casablanca’s most obvious sight is the Hassan II Mosque, and it also has the only Jewish museum in the Muslim world, but the city’s true delight remains the Mauresque and Art Deco architecture built during the colonial period, in particular the 1920s and 1930s. Casa can be a bewildering place to arrive, but once you’re in the centre, orientation gets a little easier. Its focus is a large public square, Place Mohammed V, and most of the places to stay, eat, or (in a rather limited way) see, are located in and around the avenues that radiate from it. A few blocks to the north, still partially walled, is the Old Medina, which was all there was of Casablanca until around 1907. Out to the south is the Habous quarter – the New Medina, created by the French, while to the west, along the Corniche past the Hassan II Mosque, lie the beach suburbs of Aïn Diab and Anfa.
Casablanca’s colonial architecture
The French-built city centre and its formal, colonial buildings already seem to belong to a different and distant age. The style of the administrative buildings in particular is known as Mauresque, or sometimes as “Neo-Moorish”, essentially a French idealization and “improvement” on traditional Moroccan styles, with lots of horseshoe arches, and even the odd touch of darj w ktarf, originally an Almohad motif. Many private buildings of the early colonial period (from 1912 until the early 1920s) were heavily influenced by the flowery Art Nouveau of fin-de-siècle Europe. Following the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, a new and bolder style, named Art Deco after the Exposition, began to take hold, inspired by many sources, including traditional Moroccan design. A meander along downtown Casa’s streets, taking in the city’s Deco heritage – be sure to look upwards, since most of the finer features stop short of ground-floor level – can prove very rewarding.
Church of St John the Evangelist
The Church of St John the Evangelist, on the corner of Avenue Moulay Hassan I and Rue Félix et Max Guedj (stjohnscasablanca.org), stood in open fields when it was built in 1906. Within twelve months of its consecration, the church was involved in events that led to the first French landings. Some Europeans working on the port were murdered when Shaweea tribesmen from the interior invaded the town and sacked the church. Peace – of a sort – was restored by a French bombardment and subsequent occupation.
In 1942, during World War II, the church was filled with Allied troops involved in Operation Torch. A member of the congregation at this time was General George Patton, who had led his troops ashore at Safi. He presented the oak pulpit, which still stands in the church, “in memory of the men of all nations who fell in the fighting around Casablanca”. After his death in 1945, the carved frontal for the communion table was presented to St John’s by his family. The church stands on land still owned by the British Crown, and Sunday services are conducted at 9.30am and 11.30am.
Boulevard Mohammed V and around
Linking the city centre with Casa’s eastern suburbs, Boulevard Mohammed V became the palette on which the French wished to showcase their Protectorate-era architectural prowess. The Hôtel Lincoln is an early example of colonial Mauresque, dating from 1916. Though now derelict, partially collapsed and consequently fenced off, its architectural grandness is still plainly visible. Opposite here is the Marché Central, built in the 1920s to serve the neighbourhood’s European clientele and still the busiest downtown market. West of the Lincoln along the south side of Boulevard Mohammed V, there’s a whole row of splendid facades from the same period, starting with the post office at no. 116, which incorporates a Europeanized version of the Almohad darj w ktarf motif. The most striking facade on this strip is the Maroc Soir/Le Matin du Sahara newspaper office, one block west, which boasts a wonderful frontage based on a hexagram motif, topped with a green-tiled roof. There are more fine buildings on both sides of the boulevard for a couple of blocks east, but if you turn south up Rue Mohammed el Qorri, you’ll see the Rialto Cinema, a gorgeous 1930s Art Deco picture palace, both inside and out.
Continuing south along Rue Mohammed el Qorri, you emerge at Place Aknoul, in the thick of some of Casa’s finest colonial-era buildings. The road straight ahead, Rue Tahar Sebti, is full of them, and Rue Abdelkarim Diouri, over to your left, has a nice little bunch at its junction with Rue Ibn Batouta (two blocks up), especially the Bar Lyonnais. Opposite is the 1919 Hôtel Volubilis and behind that, the 1922 Hôtel Transatlantique. Beyond here, on Avenue Lalla Yacout, the Auto Hall at no. 44 is a very imposing Art Deco edifice.
Some wonderful architecture can be seen above the street level in the immediate area around Rue Prince Moulay Abdallah. Heading west from Place Aknoul, down Rue Idriss Lahrizi towards the post office, there are some great facades along both sides of the street. It’s worth making a detour to take the first street on the left, Rue Mohammed Belloul, where the Hôtel Guynemer, at the first corner on the right, has some Art Deco panels up on its cornerpiece. A right here brings you to the pedestrianized stretch of Rue Prince Moulay Abdallah, where there’s a whole row of Mauresque and Art Deco facades on both sides, and some lovely little touches too: the Art Deco doorway at no. 48, for example, has a bird of paradise incorporated into the ironwork (as does 25 Rue Mouftakir Abdelkader, in the same block, just round the corner), while no. 72 is topped with some pretty Art Nouveau ironwork. At the northern end of the pedestrianized street is Place 16 Novembre, where no. 19 is the most handsome of a trio of charming Art Deco buildings, while at the southern end, Boulevard de Paris leads west to Place Mohammed V. On the way, check out the fine group of buildings around the junction with Rue Tata.
Place Mohammed V is truly grand in scale. The public buildings around it served as models for administrative architecture throughout Morocco. The square stood at the centre of a network of boulevards drawn up by Resident General Lyautey’s chief architect, d’Henri Prost, who made his plan based on a projected population of 150,000, considered far too high by many when he proposed it in 1914, but already exceeded by the time he left in 1923. Prost was keen to combine traditional Moroccan forms with current European town planning ideas, and was more than anyone else responsible for Casablanca’s shape, and much of its architectural style.
The effect of the central ensemble in Place Mohammed V is very impressive indeed, the only feature out of place being a clock tower in the old Préfecture, on the south side of the square. The law courts on the east side of the square, and the Bank al Maghrib on the north are both solidly imposing too, and unlike much of the city’s architecture, barely seem to have aged at all, probably because so many more recent buildings are modelled on them. On the west side of the square, the 1919 post office incorporates lots of surprisingly traditional features, in the tilework around the door for example, as well as the ceiling and brass chandelier within.
Abderrahman Slaoui Foundation Museum
12 Rue du Parc • Charge • 0522 206217
Located in a restored 1940s villa down a quiet, leafy street, the Abderrahman Slaoui Foundation Museum showcases a life’s worth of “treasure hunting” by the museum’s namesake, a well-travelled Moroccan businessman. A number of exhibitions are displayed through the multi-level villa, showcasing antique Moroccan gold jewellery, artworks from early twentieth-century Morocco and vintage Orientaliste posters, and curiosités and objets d’art from around the world. It’s all very classy and well presented (ask reception for an English-language programme), and there’s a lovely rooftop café.
Rue d’Alger • Not in use for services, but you should still be able to go inside; open from time to time for temporary art exhibitions
Casablanca’s most classic piece of colonial architecture, the Cathedral of Sacré Cœur, sits at the western end of the Parc de la Ligue Arabe. Quite European in style, though adopting some African forms, the cathedral was built to a wonderfully balanced and airy design, paying genuine homage to its Moroccan setting.
Though it no longer functions as a religious building, most days you can still look around. There’s not all that much to see inside except the stained-glass windows, which are truly impressive and, if you’re lucky, the gardien may escort you to the top of the tower for a brilliant view of the city and port (a small tip is appreciated).
30 Bd Brahim Roudani • Free • villadesarts.ma
The Villa des Arts, set in a 1930s Art Deco villa, is part of the ONA Foundation, one of Morocco’s eminent cultural and artistic organizations. Accessed through a peaceful garden and past a large fountain, the all-white villa has been lovingly restored by the foundation, and its grand high-ceilinged entrance leads to a number of galleries hosting both permanent and temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.
Just to the west of both the port and Casa’s downtown area, the Old Medina dates largely from the late nineteenth century. Before that, it was little more than a group of village huts, half-heartedly settled by local tribes after the site was abandoned by the Portuguese in 1755. Casa Branca, the town the Portuguese founded here in the fifteenth century after the expulsion of the pirates, had been virtually levelled by the great earthquake of that year. Only its name (“White House”: Casablanca in Spanish; Dar el Baïda in Arabic) survives.
The Medina has a slightly disreputable air (it’s said to be the place to go to look for any stolen goods you might want to buy back) but it isn’t sinister, and it can be a good source for cheap snacks, fake watches and general goods. A single main street, which starts from the top end of Boulevard Félix Houphouët Boigny, by a restored clock tower, as Rue Chakib Arsalane, becomes Rue Jemaa Ach Chleuh halfway along. A small eighteenth-century bastion, the Skala, has been restored, with some old cannons and an upmarket café-restaurant.
About a kilometre southeast of the city centre, at the end of Avenue Mers Sultan, is the Quartier Habous – or New Medina – which displays a somewhat bizarre extension of Mauresque. Built in the 1930s, it was intended as a model quarter, and it still has a kind of Legoland look, with its neat little rows of streets. What’s most unreal, perhaps, is the neighbourhood mosque, flanked by a tidy stretch of green just as if it were a provincial French church.
Alongside its wealth and its prestige developments – notably the Hassan II Mosque – Casablanca has had a reputation for extreme poverty, prostitution, crime, social unrest and the bidonvilles (shanty towns) which you will see on both sides of the train track as you come into town. In fact, the French word bidonville – literally “tin-can town” – was coined in Casablanca in the 1920s, when construction workers on a building project in the Roches Noires district, east of the port area, knocked up some temporary accommodation next to their main quarry. Over the decades, other migrant workers followed suit, and the bidonvilles escalated, partly from the sheer number of migrants – over a million in the 1960s – and partly because few of them intended to stay permanently. Most sent back their earnings to their families in the country, meaning to rejoin them as soon as they had raised sufficient funds for a business at home.
The pattern is now much more towards permanent settlement, and this, together with a strict control of migration and a limited number of self-help programmes, has eased and cleared many of the worst slums. Additionally, bidonville dwellers have been accorded increasing respect during recent years. Officially they cannot be evicted if they have lived in a property over two years (though in practice this continues to happen), and after ten years they acquire title to the land and building, which can be used as collateral at the bank for loans. The dread of every bidonville family is to be evicted and put in a high-rise block, regarded as the lowest of the low on the housing ladder.
The problem of a concentrated urban poor, however, is more enduring, and it represents – as it did for the French – an intermittent threat to government stability. Through the 1940s and 1950s Casa was the main centre of anti-French rioting, and post-independence it was the city’s working class that formed the base of Ben Barka’s Socialist Party. There have been strikes here sporadically in subsequent decades, and on several occasions they precipitated rioting, most violently in the food strikes of 1982. More recently, the bidonvilles also proved a fertile recruiting ground for jihadi extremists – one bidonville, Sidi Moumen, was home to perpetrators of bomb attacks in Casablanca in 2003 (portrayed in the 2014 movie Horses of God), and Madrid the following year, and also to a suicide bomber who blew himself up in a Casablanca internet café in 2007.
South again from the New Medina, at the junction of avenues Mers Sultan and 2 Mars, alongside the Rond-point de l’Europe, the Church of Notre-Dame de Lourdes was completed in the 1950s. It’s smaller than the Cathedral of Sacré Cœur and still in use. Its beautiful stained-glass windows, the work of Gabriel Loire, a master craftsman from Chartres, are its pride and joy.
Bd Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdallah • Charge • fmh2.ma •20min walk from downtown along Bd Moulay Youssef, or petit taxi, or bus #56 from Bd Félix Houphouët Boigny
Raised on a rocky platform reclaimed from the ocean, the Hassan II Mosque was inaugurated on August 30, 1993. Designed by French architect Michel Pinseau, it is open to non-Muslims on accompanied visits that also take in the mosque’s huge and elaborate basement hammam.
From the city centre, the mosque’s huge size (20,000 square metres) tricks you into thinking it’s nearer than it is. The minaret is 200m high, making it by far the tallest structure in the country, and the tallest minaret in the world. A laser on its summit projects a beam towards Mecca. It has space for 25,000 worshippers within and 80,000 more in the courtyard. From the street, the mosque seems to float on the ocean below, a reminder of the Koran’s statement (11:7), reiterated by Hassan II, that God’s throne is upon the water. In order that the faithful can “contemplate God’s sky”, the enormous roof of the mosque rolls open on occasions.
The facts of the mosque’s construction are almost as startling as its size. During the early 1990s, when it was being readied for opening, 1400 men worked by day and a further 1100 by night. Most were master-craftsmen, working marble from Agadir, cedar from the Middle Atlas, granite from Tafraoute, and (the only import) glass from Murano in Venice. Its cost is reckoned to have exceeded £500m/US$750m, raised by not entirely voluntary public subscription.
3km west of the port and Old Medina • Bus #9 from Bd Félix Houphouët Boigny, tram to Aïn Diab Plage station, petit taxi from Pl des Nations Unies or 30–45min walk
A beach within Casa may not sound alluring – and it’s certainly not the cleanest and clearest stretch of the country’s waters – but Aïn Diab’s big attraction is not so much the sea, in whose shallow waters Moroccans gather in phalanx formations, as the beach clubs along its front, each with one or more pools (usually of filtered sea water), a restaurant and a couple of snack bars. The prices and quality of the clubs vary – most locals have annual membership, and for outsiders a day or weekend ticket can work out expensive – so it’s worth wandering round to check out what’s available.
81 Rue Chasseur Jules Gros, 5km south of town • Charge • jewishmuseumcasa.com • Petit taxi from the centre – ask your driver to wait as taxis locally are scarce, or a 15min walk from Oasis tram and train station
The Museum of Moroccan Judaism, in the southern suburb of Oasis, is the only Jewish museum to be found in the Islamic world. It is also an important resource of information on Morocco’s massive Jewish heritage, one that rather dwarfs the country’s five-thousand-strong Jewish population, of whom more than sixty percent live in Casablanca.
The museum, housed in a bright, modern building, exhibits photographs of synagogues, ancient cemeteries and Jewish holy sites nationwide. Also on display are reconstructed synagogue interiors, books and scrolls, traditional costumes – both full- and doll-size – and sacramental items, mostly made of silver and some hailing from Manchester, in the UK. Since silverwork was once the preserve of Morocco’s Jews – even today, you’ll find the jewellery souk in the Mellah (Jewish quarter) of many Moroccan towns – there are exhibits here of Jewish-made silver jewellery, and a reconstructed jeweller’s workshop.
Arrival and departure Casablanca
Casablanca’s Mohammed V Airport (casablanca-airport.com) is around 25km from downtown Casa. Royal Air Maroc offers a daily service (1hr 45min) between Casablanca and Algiers, which is currently the only way to travel direct between the two countries. To get into town from Mohammed V Airport, trains run hourly to and from Casa Port (via Casa Voyageurs, no change required) daily 5.55am–9.55pm, with a further two services at 11.45pm and 3.55am (50min; 40dh 2nd class). The official rate – always current and not “out of date” as some taxi drivers try to persuade – for a grand taxi between the airport and the city centre is signposted at the taxi rank just outside the terminal building. Car rental companies with desks at the airport include Avis (avis.ma), Hertz (hertz.ma) and local company First-Car (firstcar.ma). There are bank ATMs and bureaux de change in the main terminal building.
Airlines Air France, 11 Av des FAR (airfrance.com); British Airways, Centre Allal Ben Abdallah, 47 Rue Allal Ben Abdallah (ba.com); Iberia, 17 Av des FAR (iberia.com); Royal Air Maroc, 44 Av des FAR (royalairmaroc.com).
Destinations Agadir (4–6 daily; 1hr–1hr 20min); Al Hoceima (1 weekly; 2hr 20min); Dakhla (1–2 daily; 2hr 15min); Fez (7 weekly; 55min); Laayoune (1–2 daily; 1hr 35min); Marrakesh (5–7 daily; 40min–55min); Nador (7 weekly; 1hr 25min); Ouarzazate (6 weekly; 1hr 10min); Oujda (2 daily; 1hr 10min); Tangier (9 weekly; 1hr).
The first stage of the country’s grand development of a 1500km high-speed rail (HSR) network, between Casablanca and Tangier, was inaugurated in late 2018. The line with super-slick trains has cut the journey time between Casablanca and Tangier from nearly 5 hours to just over 2 hours.
The most convenient of Casablanca’s train stations is Casa Port (Gare du Port), near the end of Bd Félix Houphouët Boigny, 500m from Pl des Nations Unies. Opened in 2014 after a massive reconstruction, the multistorey building now includes various dining options and an undercover car park. Only local trains from the surrounding region (including the airport) call here, as most intercity trains stop at the less convenient Casa Voyageurs.
Destinations Aéroport Mohammed V (6.08am, 7.17am, 7.50am, then hourly 9.08am–9.08pm; 50min); Casa Voyageurs (1–2 hourly 6.08am–9.08pm, 13min); Aïn Sebaa (1–2 hourly 6.35am–9.40pm; 10min); Kenitra (1–2 hourly 6.35am–9.40pm; 1hr 40min); Mohammedia (1–2 hourly 6.35am–9.40pm; 25min); Rabat (1–2 hourly 6.35am–9.40pm; 1hr).
Belying its status as one of the country’s major rail hubs, the nondescript Casa Voyageurs (Gare des Voyageurs) station is tucked away some 2km from the city centre, at the far eastern end of Bd Mohammed V. Petits taxis are often waiting outside but are renowned for overcharging. Otherwise, catch a connecting train to Casa Port or the tram, which travels along Bd Mohammed V between the station and Pl des Nations Unies, or you can walk (30min).
Destinations Aéroport Mohammed V (5.40am, 6.26am, 7.34am, 8.09am, then hourly 9.26am–9.26pm; 32min); Asilah (8 direct & 2 connecting daily; 4hr–5hr 30min); Casa Port (1–2 hourly 7.11am–11.11pm, 13min); El Jadida (8 daily; 1hr 25min); Fez (hourly 6.05am–10.05pm; 4hr); Kenitra (1–2 hourly 5.50am–9.20pm; 1hr 40min); Marrakesh (9 daily; 3hr 20min); Meknes (hourly 6.05am–10.05pm; 3hr 15min); Mohammedia (5.50am–10.30pm 1–2 hourly; 25min); Nador (1 direct & 2 connecting daily; 10hr 30min–11hr 20min); Oujda (1 direct & 2 connecting daily; 10–11hr); Rabat (1–2 hourly 5.50am–10.30pm; 1hr 30min); Tangier (8 direct; 4hr 40min–6hr 20min & 2 connecting daily; 7–8hr).
CTM buses operate from their conveniently located city-centre terminal on Rue Léon l’Africain. Both petits and grands taxis are usually parked directly outside. Most private bus firms operate out of the Ouled Ziane gare routière, 4km southeast of the city centre and best reached by petit taxi; alternatively, bus #10 & #36 operate between Bd Mohammed V (opposite the Marché Central) and the busy Ouled Ziane road. For Mohammedia, local bus #900 (hourly 8am–7pm) operates from Rue Ziad ou Hmad, just west of Pl Zellaca and near Casa Port station.
Destinations Agadir (13 CTM & over 20 others daily; 8–9hr); Beni Mellal (6 CTM daily & others roughly hourly; 4hr); Chefchaouen (1 CTM & 1–2 others daily; 6hr); El Jadida (8 CTM daily & others hourly; 2hr); Er Rachidia (2 CTM & 2 others daily; 11hr); Essaouira (4 CTM & over 10 others daily; 7–8hr); Fez (14 CTM & over 10 others daily; 4hr 30min); Laayoune (5 CTM daily; 19–20hr); Marrakesh (21 CTM daily & others hourly; 4hr); Meknes (11 CTM & over 10 others daily; 4hr); Ouarzazate (3 CTM daily; 9hr); Oujda (5 CTM daily; 11hr); Rabat (31 CTM daily & others every 15–30min; 1hr 30min); Tangier (5 CTM & over 10 others daily; 5hr 30min–6hr 30min); Tetouan (6 CTM & over 10 others daily; 6–7hr).
Most grands taxis operate from the Ouled Ziane gare routière. The main exceptions include those for Rabat, which operate on Bd Hassan Seghir, very near the CTM terminal; Mohammedia, which operate from Rue Zaid ou Hmad, just west of Pl Zellaca and close to Casa Port train station; and El Jadida, Safi and Essaouira, which operate on Bd Brahim Roudani, by the junction with Bd Bir Anzarane in Maarif, 2km southeast of the city centre (served by local buses; see below).
Destinations El Jadida (2hr); Fez (3hr 30min); Mohammedia (30min); Rabat (1hr 20min); Safi (3hr 30min); Tangier (5hr).
By bus The most useful bus routes are those that connect downtown with Casa Voyageurs (#2), Ouled Ziane gare routière (#10 or #11), and the Essaouira/El Jadida taxi stand in the suburb of Maarif (#7). The other useful services are #56 from Bd Félix Houphouët Boigny and Pl Oued el Makhzine to Hassan II Mosque, and #9 from the same stops to Aïn Diab. Be warned that traffic is often terrible and buses can get very crowded at rush hours.
By taxi Petits taxis are easy to find along the main avenues and are invariably metered – as long as the meter is switched on... There is a fifty-percent surcharge at night.
By tram Casa’s modern, a/c tramway network (daily 5.30am–10.30pm; casatramway.ma) began operating in late 2012 and offers almost fifty stops along some 30km of track, providing access between the city centre and the seaside suburb of Aïn Diab and the Casa Voyageurs train station.
By car Traffic is a nightmare in Casa, and frequently gridlocked. If hiring, it’s much easier to pick up a car from the airport at the end of your stay in the city and head out to explore Morocco from there.
Tourist information Syndicat d’Initiative, 98 Bd Mohammed V (0522 221524); central and offers free maps, but not much else. The Conseil Régional du Tourisme have a kiosk just north of Pl Mohammed V, on Av Hassan II, and another next to the Hassan II Mosque (visitcasablanca.ma).
Although there are a large number of hotels in Casa, they operate at near capacity for much of the year and can fill up at short notice for conferences. If possible, book ahead, or at least arrive fairly early in the day. Even with a reservation, it’s wise to phone ahead the day before to confirm. There are a good number of cheapies located downtown between the CTM bus station and Marché Central, though many have definitely seen better days.
Downtown, map
Galia 19 Rue Ibn Batouta 0522 481694. The best budget option in the city, with friendly English-speaking management and in a very handy location next to a tram station and close to CTM. The tiled rooms are functional and clean, with or without bathroom (24hr hot water), and strong wi-fi. €
Guynemer 2 Rue Mohammed Belloul 0522 275764. Popular, family-run hotel in the most architecturally interesting part of town, with great Art Deco touches on the exterior. Room sizes vary – the singles and doubles are more modern, whereas the older twins have much larger bathrooms. It has a licensed restaurant and the staff are very friendly, helpful and mostly speak good English. Airport (and sometimes bus & train) pick-ups can be prearranged. €
Hyatt Regency Casablanca Pl des Nations Unies casablanca.regency.hyatt.com.Casablanca’s most prominent and best-managed deluxe hotel, with a range of five-star facilities and three restaurants, as well as a bar and separate nightclub that are both popular with the after-work business crowd. Service is impeccable and the rooms are modern and spacious, including two adapted for wheelchair users. Prices are "dynamic" but the maximum price of a standard double shouldn't exceed €€€€
Ibis Moussafir Casablanca City Center Cnr Rue Zaid ou Hmad & Rue Sidi Belyout ibis.accorhotels.com. Located across the road from Casa Port, this stock-standard offering holds no surprises. The rooms are comfortable, compact and with just enough mod cons to justify the price; seven are wheelchair-adapted. There’s a buffet breakfast and separate restaurant. BB €€€
Ibis Moussafir Casablanca Voyageurs Pl de la Gare ibis.accorhotels.com. As with other original hotels in this chain, it’s situated right beside the train station; in this case it’s Casa Voyageurs, so hardly central, though very convenient for a late arrival (book in advance) or early departure. Rooms are small but functional, and there is a restaurant, (sometimes noisy) bar, and car park. €€€
The names of Casa’s chief squares – Place Mohammed V and Place des Nations Unies – are a source of enduring confusion. In 1991, Hassan II declared that the old Place des Nations Unies (around which are grouped the city’s main public buildings) be known as Place Mohammed V, while the old Place Mohammed V (the square beside the Medina) was renamed Place des Nations Unies.
As elsewhere in Morocco, many of the old French street names have been revised to bear Moroccan names, but many people use the old names – as do some street maps. In this edition, we have used the new Moroccan names. Significant conversions include:
Maâmoura 59 Rue Ibn Batouta hotelmaamoura.com. Owner-managed and one of the city centre’s better value options, located on a lively side street on the edge of the Art Deco neighbourhood. The modern, tiled rooms are very spacious if a little bland and soulless – neutral tones of beige and chocolate abound. There’s a poky café for breakfast and a grand restaurant. BB €€
Manar 3 Rue Chaouia 0522 452751. Close to the CTM station, this dependable cheapie offers simply furnished tiled rooms with satellite TV and spacious bathrooms; those facing inward are quieter. The reception area is rather grand, with a large chandelier and wall mural depicting charging horsemen, and an in-house café on a mezzanine at the rear. €€
Miramar 22 Rue León l’Africain 0522 310308. Just 50m from the CTM, this is the cheapest of the little hotels in the city centre. It has an old-fashioned feel, and bathroom facilities are shared (shower costs extra), but the rooms are decent enough for the price. €
Mon Rêve 7 Rue Chaouia 0522 311439. A friendly little place, and one that has long been a favourite with budget travellers. All rooms (some en suite) are accessed up a steep spiral staircase, and many of them have been renovated, but still relatively spartan. €
Negociant 116 Rue Allal Ben Abdallah 0522 314023. Opposite Hôtel Touring (see below), and very similar, though currently priced slightly higher, with clean, comfortable rooms (some en suite); it’s a popular choice with Moroccan families. Shared-bathroom singles are available. €
De Paris 2 Rue Sharif Amzian 0522 273871. A popular lower end option in the centre of town; rooms facing the street are larger and have balconies but can also be noisy. There’s a busy modern café at street level. It’s often full, so book ahead or arrive early. €
Toubkal 9 Rue Sidi Belyout 0522 311414. Part of the Best Western chain, this hotel’s major attributes are its central location and safe street parking, as well as the friendly service. The rooms are comfortable enough but nothing very special for the price, though sizeable discounts are usually available, especially in the colder months. €€
Touring 87 Rue Allal Ben Abdallah 0522 310216. An excellent-value, friendly old French hotel, with clean, comfortable rooms, some with their own shower (though shared toilets), and hot water most of the day. It’s even got its own little mosque. Definitely the first choice of the cheapies on this street. €
Windsor 93 Pl Oued el Makhazine 0522 200352. Regal looking hotel with spacious rooms that have either a large bathroom or just a shower. There’s also a decent bar, the staff are generally friendly and helpful, and there’s a number of cafés close by. BB €
The seaside suburb of Aïn Diab (about 20dh from the centre by petit taxi, 8dh by tram, or 5dh on bus #9;) provides an alternative base to the city. The options for tourists are all in the moderate to luxury price range, as the few cheaper hotels in the area cater exclusively for Moroccan guests.
Azur 41 Bd de la Corniche www.azurhotel.ma. Across the road from the beach, equipped with a decent size swimming pool, an at times noisy bar, and a pretty good restaurant. The rooms, most sea-facing, are elegantly furnished with a few modern touches and good-sized bathrooms. BB €€€
Bellerive 38 Bd de la Corniche 0522 797504. An ageing but friendly family-run hotel overlooking the beach. Rooms are a bit small and dated; request a balcony with a sea view. There’s a good pool, small playground, and a restaurant serving burgers, club sandwiches and kebabs. BB €€
Le Littoral Bd de l’Ocean Atlantique 0522 797373. Beachfront hotel with friendly management and staff, and large rooms with all the mod cons – most face seawards with a balcony. There’s a very good restaurant, swimming pool and nightclub. BB €€
One of the best-known facts about the city is that it wasn’t the location for Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca movie, all of which was shot inside the Warner Bros studio in Hollywood. Banking on a major hit and upset by the Marx Brothers filming A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros even wanted to copyright the very name Casablanca – which could have been inconvenient for the city.
The film of course owes its enduring success to the romantic tension between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but at the time of its release it received a major publicity boost by the appearance of Casablanca and Morocco in the news. As the film was being completed, in November 1942, the Allies launched Operation Torch, landing 25,000 troops on the coast north and south of Casablanca, at Kenitra, Mohammedia and Safi. The troops, under General Eisenhower, consisted mainly of Americans, whom Roosevelt believed were less likely than the British to be fired on by the Vichy French colonial authorities. An even more fortunate coincidence took place in the week of the film’s première in Los Angeles in January 1943, as Churchill and Roosevelt had arranged an Allied leaders’ summit, and the newsreels revealed its location: the Casablanca Conference, held in Anfa, out beyond Aïn Diab. Such events – and the movie – are not, it has to be said, evoked by modern-day Casa, though the movie is commemorated in the city at the American-owned Rick’s Café.
Camping Oasis Dar Bouazza, 25km south of Casablanca on the coast road to Azemmour 0522 290767. Spacious, with modern, clean ablutions (showerscost extra) and plenty of stands for camper vans, but make sure you're near a power source. The beach and restaurants are nearby. €
Eatingmap
If you can afford the fancier restaurants, Casa has the best dining in Morocco. On a budget, your choice is more limited, but there are plenty of chicken rôtisseries and snack joints, so you won’t starve. In addition to the places listed here, there are inexpensive hole-in-the-wall eateries in the Old Medina, and if you’re putting together a picnic, the Marché Central on Rue Chaouia groans under the weight of the freshest and best produce in Morocco.
La Brasserie Bavaroise 129–131 Rue Allal Ben Abdallah. Rough wooden floors and high ceilings hint at this French-style brasserie’s previous life as a German alehouse. Nowadays it’s one of Casa’s more intimate dining experiences, with an impressive menu of fish and meat dishes as well as a reasonably priced set lunch menu exquisitely prepared and accompanied by an extensive wine list. Worth the splurge. Licensed. €€€
L’Étoile Centrale 107 Rue Allal Ben Abdallah. The most “local” of the restaurants on this street and a worthy introduction to Moroccan cuisine, with a traditional interior and a friendly, easy-going atmosphere. The menu concentrates on couscous, pastillas and tajines and is consistently good. €€
Golden China 12 Rue Araibi Jilali. A welcome if a trifle pricey diversion for those suffering from tajine fatigue. The large menu covers the whole gamut of Chinese-influenced Asian cuisine, with a few vegetarian options. It’s rarely full and service is usually attentive. Licensed. €€
Le Petit Poucet 86 Bd Mohammed V 0522 275420. A slice of old Casablanca, this restaurant is dressed up like a 1920s Parisian salon (which is what it was), where French aviator and writer Saint-Exupéry used to recuperate between his mail flights south to the Sahara – a couple of framed sketches by him grace the walls. It used to be quite a classy restaurant, but nowadays it's more like a bar that serves a few standard Moroccan dishes. Licensed. €
Rick’s Café 248 Bd Sour Jdid, off Bd des Almohades rickscafe.ma. A varied lunch and dinner menu offers a fusion of Moroccan, French and Californian cuisine – try the goat’s cheese and fig salad. The pianist (Issam rather than Sam) creates a Forties and Fifties musical ambience, and apparently never tires of playing the inevitable “As Time Goes By”. Touristy, obviously. Licensed. €€€
La Sqala Bd des Almohades sqala.ma. An upmarket café-restaurant amid pleasant gardens in an eighteenth-century bastion of the Medina wall, complete with cannons. The menu is vast and inventive, with a tummy-expanding breakfast menu , a number of light and crunchy salads, as well as more substantial dishes such as tajines and grilled steaks. They also serve all-day juices, coffees, teas and cake (but no alcohol). €€
Taverne du Dauphin 115 Bd Félix Houphouët Boigny 0522 221200, taverne-du-dauphin.com. Long-established and very popular fish restaurant, with tables on the pavement as well as a more intimate, classier area at the rear, the two bisected by a lively, smoky bar serving seafood tapas. The menu is almost solely dedicated to the ocean, with just a few grillés for non-seafood eaters. The service can be a bit up and down; reservations advisable. Licensed. €€€
Casa has a surprisingly elusive nightlife in the city centre, where although bars are plentiful, they are almost exclusively the domain of men and prostitutes. This also goes for most of the clubs in town, which tend to be tacky cabaret joints at best. There are a few ultra-chic lounge bars out in the suburbs and Aïn Diab – self-conscious and full of self-importance, they don’t usually charge admission but the drinks and meals are exorbitantly expensive.
Of ordinary bars around town, those attached to the restaurants Le Petit Poucet and Taverne du Dauphin (see above) are quite relaxed and there are also a few by the Rialto Cinema. If you want to check out some typical all-male hard-drinking dens, you’ll find a row of them next to La Bodéga, along Rue Allal Ben Abdallah behind the Marché Central.
Downtown, map
La Bodéga 127 Rue Allal Ben Abdallah bodega.ma. Lively, rustic taverna-style setting with a street-level Spanish-and-Tex-Mex restaurant where it’s OK to just have a drink and watch big screen sports, as well as a downstairs bar and dancefloor (salsa night Tues). It’s fun and not too pretentious, and the drinks (including sangria) are reasonably priced.
Rick’s Café 248 Bd Sour Jdid, off Bd des Almohades rickscafe.ma. Although the ground floor is primarily a restaurant, there’s a second-floor cigar lounge just perfect for a gin and tonic while watching Bogey & Bergman’s Casablanca on a big screen. There’s also a less formal, tropical-themed rooftop terrace “bar’n’bbq”.
There’s a high concentration of clubs along Bd de la Corniche out in Aïn Diab. The term in general use for a dancefloor nightclub is “disco”, while “nightclub” usually means a place with tables and a cabaret floorshow.
Armstrong Legend 41 Bd de la Corniche. A very popular, though small, club with live music and a great party atmosphere. It can get quite packed at weekends, when it’s worth reserving a table.
Shoppingmap
Casablanca lacks any souks or quarters where artisans practise their craft; any traditional souvenirs on offer are imported from elsewhere in the country. The quality can therefore be low and prices high, making souvenir shopping only worthwhile if you’re about to leave the country.
Boulevard Félix Houphouët Boigny. On both sides of this busy road is a string of souvenir shops, all selling the same stuff and keen to secure your business at the highest negotiable price.
Exposition Nationale d’Artisanat Cnr Av Hassan II & Rue Maarakat Ohoud. Three-storey building stuffed with crafts from all over the country, with fixed prices and largely hassle-free assistance from the salesmen. Popular with large tour groups.
Librairie de France 4 Rue Chenier. This well-established bookshop caters largely for locals, but also offers a quality selection of English-language classics, a few guidebooks and some souvenir coffee table-style books.
Marché Central Bd Mohammed V. Large undercover market selling everyday grocery items, a few souvenirs, spices and argan oil, fresh produce (good olives), fresh seafood and fresh flowers. A hive of activity each day from early morning through evening, there’s also a number of cafés and snack restaurants and it’s worth a visit even if you’re not shopping. Bordered by Bd Mohammed V, Rue Allal Ben Abdallah, Rue Abdallah Almedouini, and Rue Chaouia.
Banks & exchange Most banks have main branches with ATMs along Av des FAR, between Pl des Nations Unies and Pl Zellaqa. Attijariwafa Bank, Av Hassan II (off Pl des Nations Unies) has an exchange ATM, and WafaCash bureau de change BMCI, Bd Mohammed V (off Pl des Nations Unies) has an exchange ATM; Attika Bureau de Change, 22–24 Rue Allal Ben Abdallah
Consulates Ireland (Honorary Consul), Résidence Al Hadi (entrance B, 5th floor, #20), 57 Bd Abdelmoumen (0522 272721); UK, 36 Rue de la Loire, Polo (0522 857400); US, 8 Bd Moulay Youssef (usembassy.gov/morocco).
Festivals Jazzablanca (jazzablanca.com) brings together diverse international and Moroccan performers for five days of fusion Jazz, held each April or May at the Casa-Anfa Hippodrome.
Football Casa is the best place in Morocco to see football; the city’s rivals, Raja and Wydad (also known as WAC) both play at the Complexe Mohammed V on Rue Socrate in Maarif; check the local press for fixtures.
Hospitals and doctors Dial 15 for emergency services or call SOS Médecin (0522 444444) or SOS Médecins Maroc (0522 989898) for a doctor, or SAMU (0522 252525) for an ambulance. Clinics open round the clock for emergency treatment include: Clinique Badr, 35 Rue el Alloussi Bourgogne (0522 492380–84) and Clinique Yasmine, Bd Sidi Abderrahman Hay el Hana (0522 396960). English-speaking doctors include: Dr Mohammed Bennani, 45 Rue Atlas Maarif (0522 994799); Dr Alain Guidon, 4 Rue Mohammed Ben Ali (Rue Jean Jaurès), Gauthier (0522 267153).
Pharmacies There’s an all-night pharmacy in the Préfecture in Pl Mohammed V; details of other pharmacies open out of hours appear in the local press, or on lists displayed by all pharmacies.
Police Bd Brahim Roudani (0522 989865). For emergencies call 19.
Post office Pl Mohammed V; 116 Bd Mohammed V, cnr Rue Chaouia.
Swimming pools Complexe Mohammed V (see above) houses an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool open to the public. You can swim at the beach clubs on the Corniche, in the open-air Piscine Océanique in Aïn Sebaa, and the pool at the Hyatt Regency (charge for non-guests).
Travel agencies There is a Carlson Wagonlit travel agent on the corber of Rue Allal Ben Abdallah and Rue Araibi Jilali (0522 203051).
The road and train line run side by side from Casablanca, firstly west past Azemmour to El Jadida, and then south across the plains to Marrakesh. To the east lies the desolate, dusty and largely unattractive phosphate-mining region, the Plateau des Phosphates.
Despite its strategic site at the mouth of the great Oum er Rbia River, AZEMMOUR has always been a backwater, and sees fewer tourists than any other Moroccan coastal town. This makes it a quiet, rather sedate place to visit, and staying at a riad in the whitewashed clifftop Medina is rather an attractive option.
Once in town, getting your bearings is straightforward. The town lies between the N1 Casablanca–El Jadida highway and the El Jadida coastal road, and red petits taxis constantly ply the route between the two roads. The main thoroughfare is Avenue Mohammed V, which leads to a busy, grassed square, Place du Souk, with the Medina straight ahead.
The Portuguese remained in Azemmour long enough to build a circuit of walls, directly above the banks of the river and dramatically extended by the white Medina. The best view of all this – and it is impressive – is from across the river, on the way out of town towards Casablanca.
Entrance gate is 200m north of Pl du Souk • If you wait around, the local gardien may arrive, open up and show you round; if he doesn’t turn up, try asking at the cafés overlooking Pl du Souk
From Place du Souk, on the landward side of the ramparts, you’ll see a sixteenth-century gate with an unusual, European-style, semi-circular arch. Through it extends the old kasbah – largely in ruins but safe enough to visit. Once inside the ruins, you can follow the parapet wall round the ramparts, with views of the river and the gardens, including henna orchards, along its edge. Also here is Dar el Baroud (The House of Powder), a large tower built over the ruins of an old gunpowder store; note also the ruined Gothic window.
Mellah • Private viewings only • Small donation appreciated to see the tomb
The old Mellah – Azzemour had a substantial Jewish population until the 1960s – lies beyond the kasbah at the northern end of the Medina. Here, beside ramparts overlooking the Oum er Rbia, is the old town synagogue which is still well maintained and visited occasionally by practising Jews from Casablanca and El Jadida. It’s cared for by a local family and you can look inside to see the tomb of Rabbi Abrahim Moul Niss, a shrine for Jewish pilgrims and the focus of an August moussem.
30min walk or a petit taxi ride (5dh) through the eucalyptus trees beyond the town; for personal safety, it's advisable to follow the road (signposted to the “Balnéaire du Haouzia”) rather than the riverbank
The river currents at Azemmour are notoriously dangerous, but there’s a nice stretch of sand at Haouzia beach, where a small complex of company holiday cabins occupy part of the stretch. For birdwatchers, the scrub dunes around the mouth of the river should prove rewarding territory.
Arrival and departure Azemmour
By train The train station (Azemmour Halte) is inconveniently located 2km out of town, on the far side of the N1. You can usually catch a petit taxi from the station, though sometimes demand outweighs supply. Aside from El Jadida, services to all other destinations connect through Casa Voyageurs.
Destinations Casa Voyageurs (8 daily; 1hr 10min); El Jadida (8 daily; 20min).
By bus Local bus #101 operates between Azemmour’s bus rank at Bd Boujdour, between the N1 & Av Mohammed V, and El Jadida at Pl de France, 200m south of the bus station.
Destination El Jadida (hourly 7am–8pm; 25min).
By grand taxi Grands taxis operate all day between the bus rank and El Jadida (Rue Abdelmoumen el Mouahidi, by the bus station).
Destination El Jadida (hourly 7am–8pm; 15min).
Accommodation and dining options are limited. Other than the in-house restaurants of the Medina maisons d’hôte, there are a few café-restaurants located around Pl du Souk.
L’Oum Errebia 25 Derb Chtouka, Medina azemmour-hotel.com. Once the kitchen and servant quarters for the town’s caid, L’Oum Errebia is now renovated with a distinctly modern touch – bright, abstract paintings adorn almost every spare bit of wall space, while a number of private nooks allow for some quality quiet time. There’s a choice of rooms and views; the river view from the terrace is unequalled. Dinner is a set menu (€€€, open to non-residents) of traditional Moroccan food, sourced locally and often organic. BB €€
Riad 7 2 Derb Chtouka, Medina riad7.com. An elegant, almost minimalistic Swiss-owned riad in the heart of the Medina, with contemporary artworks and furniture and decorated in blacks, whites and greys throughout. The five en-suite rooms boast quality fittings and a few mod cons, and the kitchen provides delicious, authentic Moroccan cuisine. BB €€
EL JADIDA is a stylish and beautiful town, retaining the lanes and ramparts of an old Portuguese Medina, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was known as Mazagan under the Portuguese, who held it from 1506 until 1769. The city was taken from the Portuguese by Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah and then in the nineteenth century was renamed El Jadida – “The New” – after being resettled, partly with Jews from Azemmour, by Sultan Abd er Rahman. Under the French, it grew into a quite sizeable administrative centre and a popular beach resort.
Moroccans from Casablanca and Marrakesh, even Tangier or Fez, come down to the beach here in summer; when the bars are crowded, there’s an almost frenetic evening promenade and – as in Casa – Moroccan women are visible and active participants.
El Jadida’s Medina is the most European-looking in Morocco: a quiet, walled and bastioned seaside village, with a handful of churches. It was founded by the Portuguese in 1513, and retained by them until 1769 – it is still popularly known as the Cité Portugaise. As they withdrew, the Portuguese blew up several of the churches and other important buildings. The Moors who settled here after the Portuguese withdrawal tended to live outside the walls. As in all the open ports on this coast, there was also an important Jewish community handling the trade with Marrakesh; uniquely, old Mazagan had no separate Jewish Mellah.
Midway along Rue Mohammed Ali Bahbai; accessed by steps • Charge
The beautiful old Portuguese Cistern is a subterranean vault that mirrors its roof and pillars in a shallow film of water covering the floor. It was used to startling effect in Orson Welles’s 1952 film of Othello; he staged a riot here and filmed it from within and above. It also featured in a Moroccan TV ad for Samar coffee, and locals associate it with that, rather than Welles. Bring your camera.
From the original gate onto the port, Bab el Bahr (Sea Gate), you can climb onto the ramparts and walk most of the way round (there’s an obligatory descent at Bastion St-Antoine), offering a fascinating, almost voyeuristic view of life within the Medina. You can also explore all the bastions; by Bastion St Sebastian, the restored former synagogue has an interesting crescent and Star of David on its back wall, while from the bastion itself there’s a great view looking north over an extensive Jewish cemetery.
The Christian churches and chapels of the Portuguese City are generally closed; but worth seeking out for its shiny brass spire is the small Spanish chapel, located in the heart of the Medina to the north of Rue Mohammed Ali Bahbai and now bricked up bar a small section used as a shop. More impressive is the seventeenth-century Portuguese Church of the Assumption by the entrance to the Cité Portugaise, which was once restored and used as a cultural centre, but is now again empty. The minaret of the Grand Mosque, immediately north of the Church of Assumption, was once a five-sided watchtower or lighthouse, and is said to be the only pentagonal minaret in Islam.
El Jadida’s town beach spreads southeast from the cité and port, well beyond the length of the town. It’s a popular strip, though from time to time polluted by the ships in port. Three kilometres further east along the coastal road, past the Phare Sidi Ouafi (lighthouse) and towards the Mazagan Beach Resort, is a broader strip of sand where Moroccan families set up tents for the summer. Good swimming is to be had, and there are makeshift beach cafés in the summer. Plage Sidi Bouzid, 2km southwest of the cité (bus #14 from Place Mohammed V), is more developed, with a seaside promenade flanked by some fancy villas and a few café-restaurants.
11km south of El Jadida on the R301 coast road • Buses and grands taxis ply the R301 daily between here and El Jadida (15–30min) and Oualidia (45min–1hr)
MOULAY ABDALLAH (also called Tit) is a tiny fishing village, dominated by a large zaouia complex and partially enclosed by a circuit of ruined walls. An important moussem here in late August attracts thousands of devotees – and almost as many horses in the parades and fantasias.
The village walls span the site of a twelfth-century ribat, or fortified monastery, known as Ribat Tit-n-Fitr, which was built as a base for Sufi mystics, and to defend the coast from a possible Norman invasion – a real threat at the time, the Normans having launched attacks on Tunisia. Today, there is little to see, though the minaret of the modern zaouia (prominent and whitewashed) is Almohad; behind it, through the graveyard, a second, isolated minaret is thought to be even older. If so, then it is the only one surviving from the Almoravid era – a claim considerably more impressive than its simple, block-like appearance might suggest.
Arrival and departureEl Jadida
By train The train station is inconveniently located 4km south of town on the Marrakesh road (N1); petits taxis are usually available. Services to all major destinations connect through Casa Voyageurs.
Destination Casa Voyageurs (8 daily; 1hr 20min).
By bus All services including CTM call at the bus station on Av Mohammed V, at the southern end of town; from here it’s a 15min walk to the Medina or to most hotels. Petits taxis are usually available.
Destinations Casablanca (6 CTM daily & others hourly; 2hr); Marrakesh (over 10 daily; 4hr); Oualidia (over 10 daily; 1hr 30min); Rabat (over 10 daily; 4hr); Safi (8 CTM & over 10 others daily; 2hr 30min).
By grand taxi Grands taxis from Casa drop you by the bus station, while those from Oualidia (and sometimes direct to Safi) operate from a station on Av Zerktouni, about 2km west of the Cité Portugaise.
Destinations Casablanca (2hr); Oualidia (1hr); Safi (2hr).
Accommodationmap
It’s a good idea to book in advance in summer, when rooms can be very hard to find and prices are higher.
Bordeaux 47 Rue Moulay Ahmed Tahiri, signposted from Rue Ben Tachfine 0523 373921. Down a small side street, this old hotel – the oldest in town, so the patron claims – is spotlessly clean and attractively refurbished, and some rooms are now en suite with a/c. Easily the best of a number of cheapies in this neighbourhood. €
Bruxelles 40 Av Ibn Khaldoun 0523 342072. Cheap and cheerful, this hotel is in a handy location just 10min walk from both the beach and Medina. The ageing but large, clean rooms are accessed by a steep stairway – some are en suite and others have balconies. The wi-fi is good, and drivers will appreciate the undercover parking. €
Dar El Jadida 7 Rue Joseph Nahon, Cité Portugaise 0523 372807 or 0610 266145.One of a number of Medina maisons d’hôte that have opened in recent years, this one is more homely than most thanks to the friendly Sicilian owner-manager, a former gondolier. The rooms are pretty compact and have private bathrooms, though not all are en suite. Breakfast on the terrace is accompanied by sweeping city and ocean views, and a delicious authentic Italian dinner is available if pre-booked. BB €
Ibis Moussafir El Jadida Pl Nour el Kamar ibishotel.com. In a prime location right on the beach. The rooms are the usual Ibis standard – compact, carpeted and with a couple of mod cons, many have sea views (no balconies), and two on the ground floor are wheelchair-friendly. The service is usually good, and there is a restaurant, bar, swimming pool and secure parking. BB €€€
Mazagan Beach Resort Plage Haouzia, 5km north of El Jadida mazaganbeachresort.com. Sprawling and impressive resort with hundreds of elegantly furnished rooms, all with French balconies offering sea (sometimes only partial) or pool views, and a choice of restaurants & bars, as well as a nightclub and casino. There’s private beach access, an eighteen-hole golf course, a good spa and gym, and a free shuttle from Casablanca’s Mohammed V Airport. BB €€€€
La Place Av Ibn Khaldoun at Rue Jules Verne 0523 373700. A modern three-star that's about the comfiest place to stay in the centre of town, with clean rooms and en-suite facilities. BB €€
Royal 108 Av Mohammed V 0523 342839. An ageing yet attractive hotel with large, airy rooms, some en suite with balcony, but no shared facilities for those without their own bathrooms. Noise can be a problem, from both the busy street and the lively beer garden. Convenient for the bus station. €
Eatingmap
El Jadida’s dining scene leaves something to be desired, offering a plethora of snack fast-food joints and just a few rare and worthy exceptions.
Espace al Mansour 46 Av Mohammed V. A popular locals’ restaurant between the bus station and town centre. Choose from pavement tables, or a colourful a/c interior. The menu offers fast, light options such as pizzas, panini, pastas, shawarma and brochettes, as well as a great selection of fresh juices. €
Laiterie Rif Rue Ben Tachfine. This small juice shop is perfect for a healthy breakfast. Order a bowl of fruit salad, accompanied by a fresh juice or smoothie, and enjoy at one of the simple pavement tables. €
Du Port Northern end of the port. This first-floor restaurant in an unprepossessing building has a lovely view of the sea and serves good and plentiful seafood, including oysters from nearby Oualidia. Licensed. €€
La Portugaise Rue Mohammed Ali Bahbai, Cité Portugaise. A very pleasant little restaurant with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, serving Moroccan rather than Portuguese dishes, including an exceptional beef tajine. €€
Puccini 70 Av Nabeul. Ground floor bar and steak house and a separate upstairs restaurant with an ocean view. Offering a nice break from tajines and couscous, the Mediterranean-inspired menu is varied and good value, with plenty of seafood and meat dishes, as well as pizzas and crunchy salads. Licensed. €€
Tchikito Rue Mohammed Smiha. A hole-in-the-wall fish restaurant that’s been serving generous helpings at low prices since 1960. Try the excellent mixed fish platter with chilli sauce. €
Drinking and nightlifemap
Drinking is kept away from the public eye and consists mainly of smoky hotel bars – try the Hôtel Royal or Ibis Moussafir.
Mazagan Beach Resort Plage Haouzia, 5km north of El Jadida mazaganbeachresort.com. If funds allow, head out to this resort, with its bars, casino and Alias nightclub, which has hosted big-name “Eastern” live acts such as Cheb Mami.
Banks Located mostly south of the town centre between Pl Mohammed V and the bus station; exchange is available from Currency Exchange Point, cnr Pl Mohammed V & Av Mohammed V.
Golf Mazagan Beach Resort (18 holes; mazaganbeachresort.com;); El Jadida Royal Golf Club, Plage Haouzia, 6km north of El Jadida (18 holes).
Hammam There’s one in the Cité Portugaise at 1 Rue No. 45 – enter the double gate, turn left along Rua do Arco and it’s 50m along on your right – with separate entrances for women and men.
OUALIDIA, 78km south of El Jadida, is a stunningly picturesque little resort – a fishing port and lagoon beach, flanked by a kasbah and a royal villa. The kasbah is seventeenth-century, built under the Saadian sultan El Oualid (after whom the village is named) as a counterweight and alternative to Portuguese-held El Jadida. Until Sultan Sidi Mohammed took El Jadida, the lagoon made an excellent harbour and, as late as 1875, a French geographer thought that “by a little dredging the place would again become the safest shipping station on the whole Moroccan seaboard”. The royal villa, now empty, was built for Mohammed V, who celebrated many birthdays and other family events here.
Today, most Moroccans know Oualidia for its Japanese oysters; Morocco’s first oyster farm was launched here in 1957 and nowadays it harvests some two hundred tonnes a year, mostly sold locally. But the town really deserves to be better known as a resort: its beach is excellent for surfing and windsurfing, and swimming is safe and easy thanks to the shielded lagoon. The atmosphere for most of the year is very relaxed, aside from August when the place is jam-packed with Moroccan holidaymakers.
Arrival and departure Oualidia
By bus and grand taxi Buses and grands taxis ply the route north to El Jadida and south to Safi throughout the day; both depart from Av Hassan II (the El Jadida–Safi highway).
Destinations El Jadida (1hr–1hr 30min); Safi (1hr).
Oualidia has a limited (though good quality) selection of traditional hotels, which invariably also double as restaurants, and privately-owned self-catering villas. Villas can be booked through Maroc Lagune Location (maroc-lagune.com), with rates typically around 800–1200dh/night, depending on the size of the villa and season.
L’Hippocampe Cnr rues Palais Royal & 11 Janvier, Oualidia Lagoon hippocampeoualidia.com. A delightful place, halfway up the slope between the lagoon and the village. The simple en-suite rooms are accessed off a pretty garden, while two suites overlook the lagoon. There are steps down to a “private” beach with free kayaks, plus there’s a pool and very good restaurant with an outdoor terrace bar. BB €€€€
L’Initiale Oualidia Plage 0523 366246. A family-run place that’s the last along the beach road, with six smallish rooms, two with a sea view (book ahead for those). Despite its close proximity to the beach, the restaurant doesn’t have any views, but is still pleasant enough and has a leafy garden. Besides a wide choice of seafood, the menu also offers pizza and pastas and a few meat dishes. BB €€
The 70km of coast between Sidi Moussa (36km south of El Jadida) and Cap Beddouza (34km south of Oualidia) is one of the richest birdlife habitats in Morocco. The coastal wetlands, sands and saltpans, the jagged reefs, and the lagoons of Sidi Moussa and Oualidia shelter a huge range of species: flamingos, avocets, stilts, godwits, storks, terns, egrets, warblers and many small waders. Numerous countryside species come in, too; golden oriole and hoopoe have been recorded, and flocks of shearwaters are often to be seen not far offshore. The best watching locations are the two lagoons and the rocky headland at Cap Beddouza.
Issa Blanca Bd Tariq Ibn Ziad facebook.com/naddiaelkhadri. Owner-managed and friendly hotel-restaurant just a short walk over the dunes to the beach (though a good 15min stroll from the main restaurant-beach area). The colourful, airy rooms, some with sea views, are tiled and tastefully decorated with modern furnishings, while the stylish ground-floor restaurant offers a varied menu of seafood and Italian-Moroccan dishes, which can be home delivered should you be staying in a rented villa nearby. €€
Motel-Restaurant à l’Araignée Gourmande Opposite Bd Tariq Ibn Ziad Oualidia Lagoon 0523 366447. Alongside the lagoon beach, offering dated but reasonably well-kept rooms, some with lagoon views. There’s also a suitably nautical yet unpretentious restaurant specializing in excellent seafood. BB €
The coastal port city of SAFI, halfway between El Jadida and Essaouira, with an old Medina in its centre, walled and turreted by the Portuguese, has a strong industrial-artisan tradition, with a whole quarter devoted to pottery workshops. These have a virtual monopoly on the green, heavily glazed roof tiles used on palaces and mosques, as well as providing Morocco’s main pottery exports, in the form of bowls, plates and garden pots.
Safi has two main squares, Place de l’Indépendance, just south of the Medina, and Place Mohammed V on the higher ground in the Ville Nouvelle (also known as the Plateau).
Pl de l’Indépendance • currently closed for maintenance
The Dar el Bahar, or Château de la Mer, is the main remnant of Safi’s 1508–41 Portuguese occupation. Built in the Manueline (Portuguese late Gothic) style of the day as the governor’s residence, it was later a fortress and a prison. Within, you can see the old prison cells at the foot of a spiral staircase to the ramparts, where a line of Dutch and Spanish cannons are ranged pointing out to sea.
The old Medina walls climb north, enclosing the Medina, to link with a large fortress known as the Kechla, Portuguese in origin, and entered from the east side, outside the Medina walls. Until 1990 it housed the town’s prison, and is now the local base of the Ministry of Culture, but they don't mind you popping in and look round. The not-very-exciting National Ceramics Museum, previously housed here, has moved down the road to Rue Medina Mounoura.
Off Rue du Socco, Medina • Charge • Head northeast up Rue du Socco for about 100m, until it opens out a little; by the entrance to the Grand Mosque, a sign painted on the wall points the way through a small doorway
A visible relic of the Portuguese occupation is the Medina’s Cathédrale Portugaise. It’s actually just the choir gallery of what was planned to be the cathedral, left uncompleted when the Portuguese withdrew. It’s adorned with sixteenth-century Manueline motifs.
If you are Muslim, you can enter two important Sufi shrines in the Medina: the Marabout Sidi Bou Dheb (at the bottom end of Rue du Socco) and the Zaouia of Hamidouch (near the Kechla). Sidi Bou Dheb is perhaps the best-known Sufi saint in Morocco and both his marabout and the Hamdouchia zaouia host moussems (held in May in recent years) attended by their respective brotherhoods. These feature music, dervish-type dancing and, often, trance-induced self-mutilation with hatchets and knives.
La Colline des Potiers (potters’ quarter) sprawls above the Medina, with its dozens of whitewashed beehive-kilns and chimneys. The processes here remain traditional – electricity and gas have made scarcely an inroad on the tamarisk-fired kilns and the foot-powered pottery wheels – and the quarter is worth at least the time it takes to wander up the new concrete steps and pathways. At the foot of the hillside is a street of showrooms. The products on display match those on offer in Fez, such as tiles, bowls and other housewares, and can be up to half the price, depending on your bargaining skills. Unofficial guides may hustle for business, and while the kilns are easily located without assistance, some guides may take you to more remote kilns and make it easier to take photographs and ask questions. If you do accept an offer of a guided “tour”, agree a price beforehand (perhaps 10dh per person) and don’t be intimidated into buying anything.
2km north of Safi • Accessed by walking through Safi port or driving down a hairpin road from Sidi Bouzid
The road north of Safi first rises 2km up to the headland of Sidi Bouzid, where a glorious sweeping view looking back over the city awaits. Down below the headland is Sidi Bouzid beach where, on November 8, 1942, American troops under General Patton landed as the southernmost thrust of Operation Torch, the Vichy French position offering little resistance. A pleasant 3km stretch of golden sand, the beach is jam-packed with Moroccan holidaymakers during summer and virtually deserted for the rest of the year.
Lalla Fatna 15km north of Safi, Cap Beddouza 23km north of Safi • Local buses #10 and #15 from Pl de l’Indépendance
North of Safi, the rocky headland gives way intermittently to sandy beaches, sheltered by cliffs and with good waves for surfers as well as safe swimming conditions. The best of these cliff-sheltered beaches is Lalla Fatna, 15km north of Safi and a steep two-kilometre descent from the road, with a koubba, but little else, so bring provisions. If camping, be sure to pitch your tent far enough back from the tides. Another 8km further on from Lalla Fatna is the headland and lighthouse of Cap Beddouza, with another very pleasant sandy beach.
By train Safi’s small train station is about 1.5km south of the Medina (15min walk); all trains connect via Benguerir. Petits taxis can usually be hailed from the street.
Destinations Benguerir (2 daily; 2hr), connecting for Casablanca Voyageurs (2hr 20min), Fez (6hr 30min), Marrakesh (1hr) and Rabat (3hr 25min).
By bus All companies including CTM operate from the gare routière, around 1.5km and a confusing 20min walk south of the Medina. Petits taxis can be hailed from Bd Kennedy just outside the station’s entrance.
Destinations Agadir (4 CTM & over 10 others daily; 6hr); Casablanca (9 CTM & over 20 others daily; 4–5hr); El Jadida (6 CTM & over 10 others daily; 2hr 30min); Essaouira (4 CTM & over 20 others daily; 2hr); Marrakesh (1 CTM & 15 others daily; 2hr); Oualidia (2 CTM & over 10 others daily; 45min).
By grand taxi Shared grands taxis operate from the bus station.
Destinations Casablanca (3hr 30min); El Jadida (2hr); Essaouira (2hr 30min); Marrakesh (2hr 30min); Oualidia (1hr).
Tourist information Online in French at safi-ville.com.
Safi’s famed sardines are caught in the deeper waters of the Atlantic, from Boujdour in the south to Safi in the north. There are around five hundred 18–20m wooden trawlers in the town fleet and you can still see them being made in the boatyards at Safi, Essaouira and Agadir. The fleet lands 350,000 tonnes of sardines annually (seventy percent of the country’s total seafood catch) and most of them are canned in Safi. Increasingly, those caught further south are landed at the nearest port and brought to Safi in refrigerated trucks. Most of the tins get sold abroad – Morocco being the world’s largest exporter of sardines.
Accommodationmap
Anis Cnr Rue du R’bat & Rue de la Falaise 0524 463078. Cheerless but reasonably central place with a range of room types, some with en-suite facilities. €
Assif Av de la Liberté www.hotel-assif.ma. An average mid-range hotel, with functional but dated tiled rooms, some (for not very much more) with a/c, heating and balcony, and there’s an adequate restaurant. €€
De l’Atlantide Rue Chaouki 0524 462160. Over one hundred years old and once the centre of Safi society. It’s well and truly lost her sparkle but still retains a certain old colonial charm, especially in the grand public areas. The rooms are old and tired, but some offer a great view across to the Atlantic. €
De l’Avenir 1 Impasse de la Mer 0524 131446. The best of a trio of cheap hotels tucked just inside the Medina (hotels Essaouira and Paris are tolerable fall-backs). Hot showers (extra charge) on the first floor, grand views of the sea from some rooms and a busy café downstairs. €
Camping International Safi 2km north of town, signposted to the right off the road to Oualidia 0524 463816. Spacious and well shaded, this campsite has a shop and pool, as well as an internet café close by. It offers some great views over the town and towards the sea, and it’s 1km from Sidi Bouzid beach. €
Kenzo 82 Bd Kennedy kenzohotel.com. A very good mid-range hotel in a handy location, though on a busy street. Some of the compact rooms boast a balcony. There’s also a ground-floor café and patisserie, and a separate restaurant. BB €€
Riad Asfi 11 Pl de l’Indépendance hotelriadsafi.com. One of the newer hotels in town, with large modern rooms, most facing inwards but some with a fantastic view over the port and ocean. The fifth-floor restaurant offers the same great views. The management is spot-on, and staff are eager to please. Good-value singles. €€
Riad Le Cheval Blanc 26 Derb el Kaouss riad-cheval-blanc.com. Great location near the port entrance to the Medina, this attractive riad has been tastefully restored by its French-Moroccan owners. The rooms are typically on the dark side but have decent-sized bathrooms. A sumptuous breakfast is served on the rooftop terrace, accompanied by sweeping Medina views. BB €€
Safi Surf House 1 Rue de la Créte surfsafi.com. Owner-managed by a knowledgeable local who also runs a surf school down on the main beach. The house is styled like a riad, with a large inner courtyard surrounded by a variety of rooms, all en suite and some sleeping up to six. The kitchen offers fresh and wholesome meals, and the vibe is relaxed and friendly. BB €€
Eating and drinkingmap
Assala Grand Café 19 Av Zerktouni. A large café with a choice of pavement seating or tables inside spread out over two levels, where big-screen TVs show sport, music and news. €
Chez Hosni 7 bis, Rue des Forgerons. A hole in the wall that just happens to serve the best tajines in town. The charming and friendly multi-lingual owner-chef takes genuine pleasure in serving his patrons, often joining them for a chat. Both the fish and meat tajines are recommended, as is the unique dessert tajine of cooked fruits. €€
Jalal Rue Allal Ben Abdallah. A café with a large children’s play area and a terrace overlooking the sea, serving tea, coffee and cold drinks. €
Les Ramparts 1 Av Bir Anzarane. Friendly café with a welcome shaded front porch looking out over the busy entrance to the Medina, as well as plenty of tables inside with large TV screens showing football. €
La Trattoria 2 Route de l’Aouinate, near the Délégation des Pêches Maritime de Safi. Upmarket and very pleasant restaurant with a good choice of pizzas, pastas and seafood dishes (try the obvious local speciality of seafood spaghetti), all reasonably priced. A little out of the way, but it’s comfortable inside and well managed. Licensed. €€
Banks Banque Populaire, BMCE, BMCI & Crédit du Maroc are all on or close to Pl de l’Indépendance. Attijariwafa Bank, Crédit du Maroc & SGMB are all on Bd Kennedy, next to Hôtel Abda.
Post office Av Sidi Mohammed Abdallah, off Pl Mohammed V, and another branch on Pl de l’Indépendance.
ESSAOUIRA, by popular acclaim Morocco’s most likeable resort, was once a haven for hippie backpackers, but it’s gradually been moving upmarket, and budget travellers may be hard put nowadays to find food or accommodation within their price range. An eighteenth-century town, enclosed by medieval-looking battlements, Essaouira’s whitewashed and blue-shuttered houses and colonnades, wood workshops and art galleries, boat-builders and sardine fishermen all provide a colourful and very pleasant backdrop to the beach. The feathery Norfolk Island pines which surround it thrive only in a pollution-free atmosphere. Many of the tourists who come to Essaouira are drawn by the wind, known locally as the alizee, which in spring and summer can be a bit remorseless for sunbathing but creates much-sought-after waves for windsurfing and, increasingly, kitesurfing. The same winds make Essaouira pretty terrible for surfing – those in the know head down the coast to Imsouane and Taghazout.
A series of forts were built here from the fifteenth century but it was only in the 1760s that the town was established and the present circuit of walls constructed. It was known to Europeans as Mogador, possibly from the prominent koubba of Sidi Mgdoul, used for navigating entry to the bay. Less likely is the legend that the town’s patron saint was a Scotsman named McDougal who was shipwrecked here in the fourteenth century. To Moroccans it was known as Seurah, from the Berber “little picture”.
The walls were commissioned by sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah, and carried out by a French military architect, Theodore Cornut, which explains the town’s unique blend of Moroccan Medina and French grid layout. The original intention was to provide a military port, as Agadir was in revolt at the time and Sultan Mohammed Ben Abdallah needed a local base. Soon, however, commercial concerns gained pre-eminence. During the nineteenth century, Mogador was the only Moroccan port south of Tangier that was open to European trade, and it prospered greatly from the privilege. Drawn by protected trade status, and a harbour free from customs duties, British merchants settled in the kasbah quarter, and a large Jewish community in the Mellah, within the northeast ramparts.
Decline set in during the French Protectorate, with Marshal Lyautey’s promotion of Casablanca. Anecdote has it that he arrived in Essaouira on a Saturday when the Jewish community was at prayer; he cast a single glance at the deserted streets and decided to shift to the port of Casablanca further up the coast. The decline was accelerated after independence, by the exodus of the Jewish community. These days, however, the town is very much back on its feet, as a fishing port, market town and ever-more-popular resort. Orson Welles’ 1952 film Othello was largely shot in Essaouira, and opens with a tremendous panning shot of the Essaouira ramparts, where Welles placed a scene-setting “punishment” of Iago, suspended above the sea and rocks in a metal cage.
The ramparts are the obvious place to start a tour of Essaouira. The Skala de la Ville (daily sunrise–sunset; free), the great sea bastion that runs along the northern cliffs, has the town’s main woodworkers’ souk at street level, and on the rampart above that, a collection of European cannons, presented to Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah by nineteenth-century merchants. At its northern end is the circular North Bastion, with panoramic views across the Medina and out to sea.
In the northeast corner of the Medina, the Mellah is the former Jewish quarter. The Jewish community in the last quarter of the nineteenth century may have comprised as much as half of the town’s population. Largely businessmen, traders and jewellers, Essaouira’s Jewish population built themselves large mansions within their quarter, some with up to twenty rooms. Alas, most of these residences are now derelict, many have been flattened with bland new buildings in their place, and the whole quarter lacks the vibe and energy of other parts of the Medina, reflecting the general trend in most of the country’s Mellahs.
Essaouira has become quite a centre for painting and sculpture, and many of its artists have made a name for themselves in both Morocco and Europe. Artists with their own distinctive styles tend to have an entourage of second-rate imitators, so it’s worth checking that the artist whose works you’re looking at really is the one whose work you were interested in (this should be the case in any of the galleries listed here).
Association Tilal 2 Rue du Caire. A gallery exhibiting the work of half a dozen or so local painters with quite distinctive styles. Many of the pieces exhibited here have been knocked up quickly to sell at low prices: to buy some of the artists’ better work, you’ll have to speak to them personally and perhaps commission something. The association should be able to put you in touch.
Espace Othello 9 Rue Mohammed Layachi, behind the Hôtel Sahara. Owned by a Belgian, originally as an overflow for the artwork he was exhibiting in his nearby restaurant; it’s now a standalone gallery, with paintings and sculptures by local artists.
Galerie d’Art Frederic Damgaard Av Okba Ibn Nafia. Paintings and sculptures by twenty or so locally based artists, in a gallery founded by a Danish furniture designer, who has passed it on to two Belgian art lovers he hand-picked for the job. The gallery also has an atelier (workshop) at 2 Rue el Hijalli, just off Pl Chefchaouni.
At the far northeast corner of the Medina, Bab Doukkala leads to a small Christian cemetery dating from colonial times (100m on the left), which is not currently open to the public. Some 400m beyond Bab Doukkala there is further evidence of the former Jewish community in the extensive Jewish cemetery – two vast grey lanes of tombstones, carefully tended and well ordered, in a site on both sides of the road. The entrance is on the left.
Essaouira is Morocco’s third fishing port after Agadir and Safi, and the harbour area bustles with life for most of the day, with the local wooden fishing boats either being built or repaired, and the fishing fleet bringing in the day’s catch. Some boats also offer rides. The sea bastion by the harbour, the Skala du Port, is open to the public (daily 9am–5pm; 60dh), and worth popping in to climb on the ramparts and enjoy the views.
The main town beach, south of the Medina, extends for miles, much of it backed by dunes, out towards Cap Sim. On its early reaches, the main activity, as ever in Morocco, is football. There’s virtually always a game in progress and at weekends a full-scale local league takes place here, with a dozen matches side-by-side and kick-offs timed in line with the tides. If you wish to join them (it’s all barefoot), just ask alongside each “pitch” and you’ll be welcomed into a game. The weekend games are especially fun even just to watch, and on occasions half the town seems to turn out for the occasion.
The southern end of the beach also has a dozen or so camel men, offering rides up and down the sands, or out to the dunes. If you fancy a ride, watch the scene for a while and be sure to pick someone you feel confident about – it’s a long way to fall. You’ll need to bargain for the best rates.
The north beach, known as the Plage de Safi, is good in hot weather and with a calm sea, but the water can be dangerous if the wind is up. It’s reached from the north end of town by skirting left along scruffy side streets for 100m once outside Bab Doukkala, the reward on arrival being miles of often delightfully empty sand.
The ruins of an old fort, Bordj el Berod, lie sinking into the sand at the far southern end of Essaouira’s wide bay. According to local mythology, this was the original “Castle Made of Sand” that inspired the track of that name on Jimi Hendrix’s Axis Bold as Love album, and it’s said that Hendrix played impromptu concerts here for his fellow hippies back in the day. Nice though it would be to believe this, Hendrix stories in Essaouira want taking with a pinch or two of salt. Axis Bold as Love, for example, was released in January 1968, but Hendrix didn’t visit Morocco until July 1969; he spent a week touring the country, of which a few days at most were in Essaouira.
On the southern side of the Oued Ksob, which is impassable at high tide, the fort is an excellent viewing spot for the Îles Purpuraires, offshore, and their birdlife. Inland you can see the ruins of a royal summer pavilion.
Arrival and departureEssaouira
By plane Essaouira–Mogador Airport is 15km south of town on the Agadir road. Inside the modern terminal are a bureau de change and desks for the international car rental franchises Avis, Budget and Europcar. While a few grands taxis are usually waiting, demand often exceeds supply and it’s best to arrange a transfer through your accommodation in advance. Alternatively, if you don’t mind a long walk, local bus #2 travels past the airport turn-off, which is 2km from the airport itself (hourly; 30min). Royal Air Maroc have an office at 15 Rue de Caire.
By train Although you can book train tickets to/from Essaouira, the Marrakesh–Essaouira sector is made by bus via the national rail carrier’s road subsidiary, Supratours (see below).
By bus Private buses arrive at the gare routière, about 500m north and a 10min walk from Bab Doukkala. Especially at night, it’s worth taking a petit taxi into town. Taxis cannot enter the Medina city walls, but you can hire one of the barrow boys who are usually on hand outside the Medina’s gates to wheel your luggage to a hotel for you – bargain for the price. CTM buses terminate at their office in Pl 11 Janvier, 1km south of the Medina (tickets can be booked in the Medina at Internet Club, next to the tourist office on Av du Caire), while Supratours buses operate from their conveniently located office at the end of a short cul-de-sac by the Medina’s south bastion (off Av Lalla Aïcha). Supratours tickets are best bought the day before, and you can add connecting tickets for onward rail travel from Marrakesh.
Destinations Agadir (3 CTM, 2 Supratours & over 20 others daily; 3hr 30min); Casablanca (4 CTM & over 20 others daily; 6–8hr); Marrakesh (2 CTM, 6 Supratours & 18 others daily; 3hr); Rabat (15 daily; 8hr 30min); Safi (4 CTM, 1 Supratours & over 20 others daily; 2hr).
By grand taxi Shared grands taxis operate from a yard by the gare routière. If arriving into Essaouira, request the driver drop you off close to the Medina on the way to the gare routière.
Destinations Agadir (2hr 30min); Casablanca (5hr); Inezgane (2hr 30min); Marrakesh (2hr 30min); Safi (2hr 30min).
Out across the bay from Essaouira lie the Îles Purpuraires, named from the dyes for purple imperial cloth that the Romans once produced on the islands from murex shellfish. Here also, Sir Francis Drake ate his Christmas lunch in 1577, commenting on the “verie ugly fish”. The largest of the islands, known as the Île de Mogador, is flanked on each side by a fort which, together with the fort on the islet just off the town harbour and the Bord el Berod on the beach, covers all possible approaches to the bay. It also has a small harbour, a mosque, a few rusting cannons and a nineteenth-century prison used for political exiles but long closed. There was a Phoenician settlement on the landward side of the island in the late seventh century BC.
Nowadays the uninhabited island is a nature reserve, and the only non-Mediterranean breeding site of Eleonora’s falcon, Morocco’s most dramatic bird, which is best seen with binoculars from the beach, in the early evening half-light. The falcons are summer visitors to Morocco, staying between May and October before heading south to Madagascar for winter. They are often seen hunting over the dunes south of Oued Ksob. The nearby river course also has many waders and egrets and occasional rarities such as gull-billed tern and Mediterranean gull.
By car If you’re driving, it’s worth making use of a guarded car park, in front of the harbour offices, south of Pl Prince Moulay el Hassan, or just east of Bab es Sebaa.
By taxi There is a petit taxi rank by the car park at the southern end of Av Okba Ibn Nafia, and taxis also serve the Medina entrances at Bab es Sebaa and Bab Doukkala.
Car rental In addition to the firms at the airport (see above), Avis have a branch at 28 Av Oued el Makhazine.
Tourist information Av du Caire, opposite the police station (0524 783532).
Accommodationmap
Al Arboussas 24 Rue Laâlouj, down a small alley 0661 461643. A nineteenth-century former Jewish residence that has been nicely adapted, with soft shades of blue, green and yellow throughout, offering eight small but impeccably clean rooms, all en suite and decorated with local textiles and intricate zellij tiling, spread out over three floors. A delicious breakfast is served at wrought-iron tables on the discreet rooftop terrace, where there are also a few sun loungers. BB €
Cap Sim 11 Rue Ibn Rochd hotelcapsim.com. Central, clean and popular, with small but comfortable rooms, some en suite and facing outwards. The bathrooms’ water is partly solar-heated. BB €
Central 5 Rue Dar Dheb, off Rue Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah 0524 783623. Cheap and cheerful basic rooms and friendly staff in a nice old house around a patio with a fig tree. Shared hot showers (extra charge). €
Dar Adul 63 Rue Touahene (near the Skala) daradul.ma. Lashings of whitewash give this place a bright, airy feel, and help keep it cool in summer. It’s run by a French artist, with a selection of different-sized rooms, some split level, and the largest with a fireplace to make it cosy in winter. BB €€
Dar Alouane (also called La Maison des Couleurs) 66 Rue Touahene 0524 476172. Simple and stylish, done out in very original decor and beautiful colours, with a range of rooms (one single available) and suites at different prices, some with shared bathrooms but still excellent value. €
Dar al Bahar 1 Rue Touahene daralbahar.com. Wild sea views (especially from the terrace), cool whitewashed rooms, and paintings and window blinds by some of the best local artists make this an excellent choice, though it’s a bit tucked away. BB €€
Dar Ness 1 Rue Khalid Ben Oualid darness-essaouira.com. A very well-located nineteenth-century house turned into an attractive riad by its French owner. There’s a variety of room sizes, some with ample and welcome natural light, plus there’s a great rooftop terrace. The staff are attentive yet not over friendly. BB €
Dar les Sirènes 59 Rue Chbanate darlesirenes.com. Essaouira’s most elegant riad, set in an old house near Bab Doukkala and transformed into a super-stylish modern space by its Italian architect owner, with smooth tadelakt walls in cool, creamy tones. There’s a choice of five rooms or suites, and the owner is often on hand to dispense advice. BB €€
Eddaize 109 Av Mohammed Zerktouni 0524 473032. Near Bab Doukkala and away from the more touristy parts of the Medina, Eddaize is spick and span, with cheap singles rooms. Some doubles are en suite but not all rooms have outside windows. €
Grand Place 4 Pl Prince Moulay el Hassan 0524 475925. A budget hotel that's trying to head at least slightly upmarket. It’s conveniently located and reasonable value, and the rooms are bright and breezy – the best have balconies, although those overlooking the square can be a bit noisy. There’s a popular restaurant down below and a terrace up top with fantastic Medina and sea views. €
Maison du Sud 29 Rue Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah hotelmaisondusud.com. An eighteenth-century house built around a covered patio with a fountain. Most rooms are split-level with a sitting area and bathroom below the sleeping area; ask for one away from the noisy street. BB €€
Riad Bab Essaouira 35 bis, Bd Moulay Abderrahmane Eddakhil riad-bab-essaouira.com. Small, stylish and well-managed riad with suites only, decorated throughout in a subtle Afro-Gnaoua theme. Each suite occupies one floor and includes a living room and separate bathroom with individual water heater. There’s a communal salon and self-catering kitchen, and the rooftop suite has its own small terrace. €€
Riad le Grand Large 2 Rue Oum Rabii 0524 472866. Despite its name, this is a small, cosy place with ten colourful yet smallish rooms, lovely staff, a restaurant and roof-terrace café (and the best room is on the roof). Good value, with reductions off-season. BB €
Riad al Medina 9 Rue el Attarine riadalmadina.eu. A former palatial mansion built in 1871, which had fallen on hard times by the 1960s and become a budget hotel for hippies – guests supposedly included Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Grace Slick and Cat Stevens. Now refurbished, it gets mixed reports: some people love it for its central location, history and character; others hate it, largely because it’s quite basic by package-tour standards, and pretty pricey for what you get. BB €€
If you’re looking for a little more space and privacy or plan to stay for more than a couple of nights, it can be worth renting an apartment or a suite within Essaouira’s Medina. There are a surprising number available, all refurbished and modernized and especially affordable for families or small groups. The pioneer of this type of accommodation in Essaouira has been Karimo (karimo.net) whose office is Jack’s Kiosk on Place Prince Moulay el Hassan. You may also be accosted by key-waving local residents either at the bus station or as you enter the town’s southern fringe, but always check out what’s on offer carefully, and be sure of the price and services you have agreed upon before accepting.
Souiri 37 Rue el Attarine hotelsouiri.com. Very central and deservedly popular, with a range of rooms; the cheaper ones have shared bathrooms. Those at the front are larger and have outside windows, though the ones at the back are quieter. €
Villa Maroc 10 Rue Abdallah Ben Yassin, just inside the Medina wall, near the clock tower, villa-maroc.com. Established long before riads became trendy, with two old houses converted into a score of rooms and suites, heated in winter and decorated with the finest Moroccan materials. It even has its own hammam. Most of the year you will need to book several months ahead, though it’s always worth a call on the off chance. Non-residents can dine here if they reserve before 4pm. BB €€€€
Auberge Tangaro Diabat village, 4km south of Essaouira, signposted from the main road aubergetangaro.com. An Italian-owned place opened in 1920 that provides a quiet alternative to staying in Essaouira. There’s a main house with an excellent licensed restaurant and a communal lounge flanked by two rows of rooms and suites, all simply furnished. Although electricity arrived in 2011, the candles are still lit every night. It’s peaceful, slightly rustic and full of charm. BB €€
Le Médina Essaouira Bd Mohammed V accor.com. Large, contemporary styled rooms and suites with private balconies, plus interconnecting rooms for families, and one room adapted for wheelchair users. Facilities include a bar, a large pool and a thalassotherapy spa centre (that is, you bathe in sea water in a spa as opposed to just swimming in the sea), and there are two overpriced, underperforming restaurants. They also have a small, guests-only section of beach, with umbrellas and sun loungers. BB €€€€
Vent des Dunes 20 Rue el Bakkay, Quartier des Dunes ventdesdunes.com. Peaceful, well-managed villa-style hotel that offers a variety of different sized, great-value rooms, including a couple of larger ones for families. There’s an in-house restaurant that also provides picnic baskets, or it’s a 200m walk to the beach café-restaurants. BB €
Villa Quieta 86 Bd Mohammed V, Quartier des Dunes villaquietaessaouira.com. A luxurious mansion, some 2km south of town, built in semi-traditional style by the current owner’s father in the 1950s. The rooms are tasteful and comfortable, and the place retains the feel of an upscale guesthouse rather than a hotel. There’s a sheltered pool and garden, and it’s only 150m to the beach. BB €€€€
Camping le Calme Ida ou Gourd, 9km east of town, on the Marrakesh road 0661 530413. Pleasant site located among the argan trees. Good ablutions, and there’s an on-site restaurant, as well as a shop selling basic provisions. Discounts for long stays. €
Eatingmap
For an informal lunch, or early evening meal, you can’t do better than eat at the line of grills down at the port, an Essaouira institution, with fish as fresh as can be. You choose from the fish displayed in front of your stall, and have it grilled there and then. Prices are fixed and displayed, but unfortunately some of the stalls have been getting rather hassly of late, and also overcharging (needless to say, it’s the same ones that hustle for business who try to pull a fast one), so check prices first, and choose a stall that doesn’t try to accost you.
Les Alizes 26 Rue de la Skala. Quiet and intimate, this restaurant has built up a good reputation for Moroccan dishes, both traditional and inventive three-course set menus including dishes such as chicken sefaa (sweet couscous with cinnamon). The place is spotless and the service always friendly. Book ahead if possible. Licensed. €€
Bab Laâchour Bab Laâchour, by Pl Prince Moulay el Hassan. A café favoured by locals downstairs, with a more tourist-oriented restaurant on the floor above, overlooking the square, where you can get a selection of fish dishes and tajines), and there’s a cheap set menu. Licensed. €
Dar al Baba 1st floor, 2 Rue de Marrakech, cnr Rue Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah. This upstairs restaurant has a short but sweet menu of Italian dishes, including mixed antipasti, fish soup and (for dessert) sorbet. It’s most celebrated for its own fresh pasta. Licensed. €
La Découverte 8 bis Rue Houmane el Fetaouki essaouira-ladecouverte.com. French-Moroccan cuisine is served at this little place run by a French couple (she does the cooking, he greets and serves the customers), with a short but sweet menu of excellent food including fish pastilla, vegetables au gratinand a constantly changing choice of daily specials. €€
Essalam 23 Pl Prince Moulay el Hassan. Good, low-priced set menus, though the choice is limited to the usual soup–tajine–fruit combos. Good for breakfast too. €€
Laayoune 4 bis Rue Hajjali. A popular place for Moroccan staples in a warm, relaxed setting with low-lying, candlelit tables and friendly service. €€
La Licorne 26 Rue Skala restaurant-lalicorne-essaouira.com. An upmarket Moroccan restaurant serving some of the best traditional French and Moroccan food in town. The tajine of saffron-infused chicken with roasted almonds is particularly recommended, and features on the set menu. €€€
Patisserie Chez Driss 10 Rue Hajjali, just off Pl Prince Moulay el Hassan. One of the town’s most popular meeting places, this long-established place serves up delicious fresh pastries and coffee in a quiet leafy courtyard. Ideal for a leisurely breakfast. €
La Petite Perle 2 Rue el Hajjali. A small place with low divan seating, popular among travellers who come for the generous servings of good traditional Moroccan cooking. There’s a selection of three- and four-course set menus, all finishing off with a pot of freshly brewed mint tea. €€
Le Table Madada 7 Rue Youssef el Fassi lateliermadada.com. Housed in a former carob warehouse, this restaurant offers excellent super-fresh seafood, including a fantastic fish platter (variable price), spider crab au gratin and lobster pastilla. €€€€
La Triskalla 58 Rue Touahen. A friendly, chilled-out café-restaurant popular with a younger crowd of both locals and travellers; the dimly lit interior adds to the relaxed atmosphere. The largely pescatarian menu offers healthy, light food and changes daily, plus there’s a good selection of fresh juices and herbal teas. Occasionally there are art exhibitions, live music or film nights. €€
Beach & Friends Bd Mohammed V, Quartier des Dunes. Worth the walk from the Medina, this beachside restaurant is partly shaded outside, though still susceptible to the wind, with live music on the beach on Fri and Sat evenings. You can recline on sun loungers, couches and comfy wicker chairs, or low-lying loungers inside. The menu offers burgers, salads and pizzas, as well as steaks. Licensed. €€
Chalet de la Plage Bd Mohammed V, on the seafront, just above the high-tide mark restaurantchaletdelaplage.com. Originally built of wood by the Ferraud family in 1893, the building is now a little gloomy, and barnacled with marine mementoes, but the seafood and ocean views are truly memorable. Avoid lunchtime, when day-trippers overwhelm the place. Licensed. €€€
DRINKING AND NIGHTLIFEmap
Taros 2 Rue de la Skala, overlooking Pl Prince Moulay el Hassan. The best evening venue in town, on a rooftop terrace overlooking the main square. Come here for the happy vibe, great views, food, cocktails and a good selection of wines and beer. There’s live music some nights, and even the odd mingling musician.
Shoppingmap
Despite its size, Essaouira rivals Marrakesh and Fez as a centre for attractive items, and it’s relatively hassle-free. The big buy here is marquetry work made from thuya (also spelt thuja; arar in Arabic), an aromatic mahogany-like hardwood from a local coniferous tree. As usual, beware of tourist emporiums selling trafika (simulated antiques and fossils). Tiles with Hebrew lettering, supposedly old tiles from the Mellah, are a favourite scam here, and any shop selling them is probably worth avoiding. Of the souks, worth particular attention are the Marché d’Epices (spice market) and Souk des Bijoutiers (jewellers’ market), on either side of Rue Mohammed Zerktouni.
Co-operative Tamounte Rue Khaled Ben Oualid. This is a good place to buy both thuya marquetry and argan oil. In both cases it comes from cooperative enterprises – a co-op of fifteen artisans make the thuya products, and a rural women’s co-op make the oil. Quality is high, and prices are fixed, marked, and comparatively low, so you’re not only contributing to fair-trade democratic enterprise, but also getting a good deal.
Ensemble Artisanal Rue Mohammed el Qorry, just inside Bab Marrakesh. This bright, whitewashed courtyard hosts a handful of thuya carvers, artisan jewellers and a painter. In a courtyard on the right, a Brazilian ombú tree, one of only three in Morocco, was planted when the town was founded in the eighteenth century.
Music Mogador 53 Rue Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah. This shop sells CDs of North African music, most notably the official CDs of the annual Gnaoua World Music Festival.
Woodworkers’ souk (Skala de la Ville) Rue de la Skala. Built into the ramparts are a number of marquetry and woodcarving workshops, long established in Essaouira, where artisans produce amazingly painstaking and beautiful thuya work. With total justice, they claim that their produce is the best in the country, and this is the best place to buy it.
Banks and money changers There are three banks with ATMs on the plaza between Pl Prince Moulay el Hassan and the port, plus BMCE, 8 Rue Hajjali, and there are money-changers around the Medina including Pro Change by the Great Mosque on Av de l’Istiqlal (daily 8am–10pm) and at 3 Rue Laâlouj.
Golf Golf de Mogador, Diabat (36 holes; golf-mogador-essaouira.com); guests at nearby Auberge Tangaro get preferential rates.
Hammam Hammam Les Deux Portes, Rue d’Oum Rabia (near Riad le Grand Large).
Post office The main office is on Av Lalla Aicha at Av Moukaouama; there’s a smaller one on Rue Laâlouj in the Medina, and one by the gare routière.
The main road south from Essaouira offers some pleasant exploration, especially if you have your own transport. There are a number of hamlets and villages dotted along the coast, most of them the domain of wind-, kite- and wave surfers.
Bus #2 runs 9 times daily between Essaouira’s Bab Doukkala and Sidi Kaouki (30min)
The beach at SIDI KAOUKI, 20km south of Essaouira, attracts wind- and kitesurfers virtually year-round, and wind generators have been installed to supply up to 95 percent of the village’s electricity. For a village of only 120 or so inhabitants, it has an astonishing amount of accommodation, though very little else (no banks, for example). Near the beach is the original Marabout of Sidi Kaouki, which is reputed to cure female sterility, and beyond that is Cap Sim, backed by long expanses of dunes.
Accommodation and eatingSidi Kaouki
There are a couple of restaurants at the village’s entrance, as well as a few other café-restaurants scattered along the beachfront road. Light meals and cold beer are also available at the landmark Sidi Kaouki Surfclub (sidi-kaouki.com), which rents out gear for surfers, windsurfers and kitesurfers.
Résidence La Kaouki sidikaouki.com. Rustic retreat that oozes simplicity and warmth. Electricity-free, the en suite rooms are candlelit, the water is heated by gas and wood, and the meals are as authentic as they come. BB €
Villa Soleil 0670 233097. Wonderful little place set back from the beachfront, with bungalows in a spacious garden as well as a larger villa. The Belgian owner-managers run a tight and happy ship, with spotless rooms and a very good in-house restaurant. €
For off-road vehicles, the pistes south along the coast from Sidi Kaouki offer a mix of long strands, dunes and scenic headlands, with occasional blue-painted fishing boats. Eventually the main road (N1) is rejoined north of Smimou, a one-street town with a petrol station and a couple of café-restaurants. A few kilometres before Smimou, a metalled road which soon turns to piste leads west to Plage d’Ifrane, one of the finest but most isolated beaches on this stretch of coast.
Gnaoua and World Music Festival
A dozen or so local moussems, fairs and festivals are held in March–Oct. Essaouira’s main annual event is the Gnaoua and World Music Festival (festival-gnaoua.net) in May or June, which focuses on a fusion of Gnaoua and world music. Stages are set up in the plaza between Place Prince Moulay el Hassan and the port, and outside Bab Marrakesh, and performers come from all over Morocco, West Africa and Europe. During the festival, you can expect transport and hotels to be full, so book well ahead.
Essaouira and its nearby beaches are Morocco’s prime wind- and kitesurfing destinations, drawing enthusiasts throughout the year. The trade wind at Essaouira is northwesterly and blows year-round; it’s stronger in summer – if you’re inexperienced, try to get out early in the morning – but the swell is bigger in winter. The winds can be quite strong but the curved shape of Essaouira’s bay, along with a gently sloping sandy bottom that creates a wide shallow area along the shoreline, makes it ideal for novices. Even during summer, the water temperature rises only to 20ºC maximum, so a wetsuit is required all year.
There are numerous surf shops and schools in Essaouira, as well as one or two further south in Sidi Kaouiki and Imsouane. Essaouira’s nonstop winds, though great for wind- and kitesurfing, can be a disappointment for board surfing, for which you’re better off down at Imsouane with its easterly facing bay.
Ion Bd Mohammed V, Quartier des Dunes oceanvagabond.com. Surf school at the far southern end of the beach which offers surfing, windsurfing and kitesurfing lessons, and rents out surfboards, wetsuits, kayaks and equipment for windsurfing or kitesurfing.
Explora Av de l’Istiqlal explorawatersports.com. Lessons and equipment rental for surfing, windsurfing and kitesurfing.
UCPA Bd Mohammed V, 500m south of the Medina ucpa.com. Windsurfing, kitesurfing, bodyboarding and kayaking, equipment and lessons.
Inland, just south of Smimou, lies the forested whaleback of Jebel Amsittene (905m). A challenging piste climbs to traverse the crest of this grand viewpoint, and descends not far from Imi n’Tilt, a busy Monday souk, and a recommended venture if you have 4WD. A little further south of Smimou, another scenic piste leads westward to Cap Tafelney, below which lies a curious village and a bay full of fishing boats.
The coast is rockier if approached from Tamanar than Smimou, a larger town with a few restaurants. Fifteen kilometres south, a surfaced road leads to Imsouane, which used to be a picturesque little harbour with a few fishermen’s cottages, but is now gradually being built up. No matter what swell, tide or wind condition prevails, its two bays should offer something for surfers and windsurfers. There’s a surf school, Planet Surf Morocco (0528 218783) down near the market, with a handful of shops nearby that rent out and repair surf gear.
Arrival and departure Imsouane
By public transport Buses and grands taxis running between Essaouira and Agadir can drop you off at the turn-off (the second Imsouane turn-off if coming from Agadir), where you should be able to get a shared grand taxi down to Imsouane.
Auberge Tasra Southern entrance to the village tasra.info. More a hostel than a hotel, offering rooms and dorms with shared bathrooms, a self-catering kitchen, and a laidback vibe. There’s also a bar-restaurant open to non-residents. Dorm €, double €
Camping Imsouane Opposite Auberge Tasra. Rather neglected but easy-going and rustic, this basic campsite has been upgraded with modern ablutions, water access and trees planted for shade, although it’ll be a while before they give any. Meals are available up the road at Auberge Tasra, and the site has glorious, sweeping ocean views. €
Kahina l’Auberge Near the market in the centre of the village 0528 826032. Formerly a surf school (and they still rent out surfboards), this is now just an auberge, whose basic but comfortable rooms open onto a central courtyard (shared bathrooms; 24hr hot water). There’s also a restaurant (open to non-guests) with tasty seafood and great sea views from a shaded terrace. €€
