Casablanca

A place with its own rhythm.

Casablanca is where Morocco goes to work. It is the country's largest city, its port, its stock exchange and its industrial engine — and it wears none of the costume that visitors expect. There are no souks performing for cameras here. There is a working city of five million people, and that is precisely what makes it interesting. What it has instead is architecture. Between the 1910s and the 1950s, French and Moroccan architects built an entire downtown in a style found almost nowhere else: Art Deco geometry married to Moorish arches, zellij tilework and carved plaster. Boulevard Mohammed V and the streets around Place des Nations Unies are an open-air museum of it, faded and still inhabited. The Hassan II Mosque is the other reason to stop. Completed in 1993, it stands partly over the Atlantic, its minaret the tallest in the world at 210 metres, and it is one of the few mosques in Morocco that non-Muslims may enter on a guided visit. The craftsmanship inside — cedar, marble, hand-cut tile — was done by six thousand Moroccan artisans. Most itineraries begin or end here, because the international airport is close. Give the city an afternoon rather than treating it as a transfer.