Postcard from Casablanca

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Casablanca: a city romanticised by a film that wasn’t even shot there, a modern metropolis, dirty, noisy and about as far removed from the glitz and glamour of the roaring twenties as you can get. But to mistake glamour for beauty is to miss the point entirely. This is a city that demands close attention to detail, finds Sam Parkes.

BY SAM PARKES | CABANA TRAVEL | 17 MAY 2025

Whenever I arrive in Casablanca, I make the long walk from a friend’s home on the western edge of the city - along a rugged Atlantic coastline, rounding the lighthouse - to downtown. I stop at the grand Hassan II mosque (the second largest mosque in Africa) and buy a strong black espresso in a paper cup from a man wearing a striped djellaba, listening to a scratchy wireless radio from the back of his van. 

I prop myself up on a wall just above the sea, in vertiginous view of the mosque’s towering minaret, and I sit and watch. It’s my personal version of balancing my circadian rhythms, whatever that means; a way of getting my eye in as a photographer.

Young boys line the high walls surrounding the mosque and fling themselves into rolling waves. Fruit-sellers wheel their carts to spots of shade. Fishermen cast lines and cats half disappear into their bait buckets. Couples lounge on parked motorcycles. A man in a straw hat presses sugar cane and pomegranate and oranges, while old men shuffle with sticks and lean against railings, and old ladies line benches. A man drops to his knees on a square of cardboard and bows his head to the ground in prayer, as schoolchildren with oversized rucksacks sprint past. Family, fraternity, food and faith; a microcosm of Moroccan life, like an archetypal scene in a snow globe.

Casablanca: a city romanticised by a film that wasn’t even shot there; a modern metropolis; the economic crank handle of Morocco; dirty, noisy and polluted, about as far removed from the glitz and glamour of the roaring twenties as you can get. But that’s to mistake glamour for beauty and to miss the point entirely, like looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. This is a city that demands close attention to detail.

Originally founded by the Portuguese, it wasn’t until the French arrived in the early 20th century that Casablanca became what it is today. It's diverse in architecture - where Europe meets north Africa: art deco, art nouveau, neo-moorish, modernism, brutalism - but its the faded art deco that gives Casablanca its unique charm.

As the prevailing architectural style of French colonial powers at that time, the city was designed to be everything art deco represented: luxurious, glamorous, exuberant, but when the French left Morocco in the late fifties, that initial elan, that grand Parisian style sunk under the weight of its own excess and Casablanca was left to slowly crumble.

“The imperfect is our paradise,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens, and the best and only sort of travel - as far as I'm concerned - is a relationship of place and self that fully engages the imagination. Perfection leaves no gaps, no jagged edges for the imagination to dovetail.

A curved art deco staircase, a geometrically perfect pattern on a metal door, a scalloped window arch, a striped awning, a slick of green tiles beneath a billowing bougainvillea - a little detail goes a long way. You can’t buy character. The patina of age and decay is hard earned. A balcony railing of the finest 16mm wrought iron, whorled like a rifle’s inner chamber, spiralling to an exquisitely tweaked moustache is enough to make you stop and sigh. All is transfigured, as though a broken mosaic had suddenly pieced itself together and resumed its ancient splendour.

I lunch at marché central, the open air market in the heart of downtown. Freshly caught fish overlap like tiles of varying pinks and silvers, neatly piled crabs with roving eyes and baskets of sea urchins and oysters and mussels tier clefts of packed ice. The head of a giant swordfish points to the ceiling like an upturned signpost.

Unlike Marrakech, Tangier or Fez, there is little geared towards tourists. Behind the medina walls, the market sells what all markets sell - piles of clothes, toasters, shoes, luggage and knock-off designer bags and sunglasses. There are barber shops and jewellers and run down hotels. My friend’s test of a real, authentic city, uncontaminated by the demands of mass tourism, is whether you can buy fake designer underpants at the market. His rationale? Tourist kitsch hasn’t overtaken real life.

I cross the street to one of the few bars downtown - harder to find than you may think in a city made famous by a movie set entirely in a bar. This one used to count Albert Camus and Edith Piaf as regulars. Curved like a single helix, the bar snakes across a tacky floor that feels as though it hasn’t been mopped since they were last here.

In other cities this would be a tourist trap, but this is Casablanca. Instead, a Moroccan man sits at a lonely bar, his head lowered in shame - drinking isn’t exactly encouraged here - as a curl of smoke escapes from his wide brimmed fedora. The bar man slides a bowl of olives and salted triangles of cucumber towards me. A lady walks in selling samosas.

I begin the long walk back to my friend's house, a little more well adjusted to the city than when I set out. I take a different route back, through the plush Arab league park, where topiaried hedges and pristine lawns edge a long fountain that creates a series of private rainbows. I pass sweeping, tree-lined boulevards and enormous white villas housing diplomats. Post drink, it could be the south of France, or Hollywood.

I continue along the corniche, past one of my favorite coffee spots overlooking a disused art deco swimming pool, to stop at a viewpoint above a long stretch of beach. Just a few years back, archaeologists found north Africa’s oldest stone age hand-axe making site here, dating back 1.3m years. It's a reminder that although Casablanca is modern by Moroccan standards, its roots stretch deep into African prehistory.

The sun begins its decline into the Atlantic with an almost apocalyptic abandon. The call to prayer starts to loop from rooftop to rooftop across the city. Two horses, spurred to a gallop, tear across the beach as though running along invisible train tracks.

A camel slowly lumbers to its feet; a man selling ice creams calls out in rhythmic haiku; children play on the sand around old ladies on plastic chairs eating snails, beneath threadbare umbrellas that look to have blown to a halt; family, fraternity, food and faith. Hand drawn football pitches with crudely marked goal posts of shirts and bags line the sand like a patchwork quilt. Cargo ships dot the horizon.

I watch from my lookout like the captain at the prow of a rusty old ship; shadowed silhouettes chase the waning flight of footballs as though in a maze, and for a moment in the golden light, black against the sun, look like the immortal figures on the sides of ancient pottery.