Casablanca, Morocco

Casablanca is where most travellers enter and leave Morocco, and it repays a day rather than a week. The Hassan II Mosque is the reason to stop: begun in 1986 and finished in 1993, it stands on a promontory built out into the Atlantic so that, in the words of the commission, the faithful might pray above the sea. It holds twenty-five thousand worshippers inside and eighty thousand on the esplanade, its minaret is among the tallest in the world, and a portion of the prayer-hall floor is glass, opening onto the water. It is one of the few mosques in Morocco open to non-Muslim visitors, on guided tours. The Habous quarter — the Nouvelle Médina — was laid out in the 1920s as a planned district in traditional form, with arcaded streets, a covered market and bookshops, and it is easier to walk than an old medina. Beyond those two, the city offers the Mohammed V square, the art-deco streets around it, and a corniche running west past the beaches at Ain Diab. It is a working port city rather than a monument city, and that is the honest description.