Casablanca - Morroco's Largest City & Port

The first thing to say about Casablanca is that it has nothing to do with the film. Humphrey Bogart was never here. Rick’s Café is a reconstruction built in 2004 by an American diplomat who had always wanted to run a bar. The film was shot entirely in Hollywood, and the director Michael Curtiz never visited Morocco. The city’s global name recognition comes entirely from a work of fiction, and the actual Casablanca — Morocco’s largest city, its economic capital, its primary port, the home of a third of its industrial output — is a very different proposition from the cinematic version.

Which is not to say it is uninteresting. Casablanca is the most modern city in Morocco, the most economically significant, and in some ways the most revealing. It is where the country’s ambitions for the twenty-first century are most legibly written — in the new financial district, in the port developments, in the ambitious urban renewal projects. It is also where the contradictions of modern Morocco are most visible: extreme wealth and significant poverty in proximity, a young population caught between tradition and modernity, a city that has grown faster than its infrastructure can comfortably contain.
Let me guide you around the real Casablanca!

5 page downloadable PDF file, perfect for dowloading onto your device or printing out.

Includes sections on;

• History of Casablanca

• Hassn II Mosque

• Art Deco & The Medina

• The Corniche