Rabat, Morocco

Rabat is the seat of government and, since 2012, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but for a traveller following the Andalusian story it matters for one building above all. In the 1190s the Almohads set out to raise three great minarets in the same design across their territory: the Giralda in Seville, the Koutoubia in Marrakech, and here in Rabat the tower of the Hassan mosque, intended as the largest of the three. Work stopped when the caliph died in 1199, and the tower stands at forty-four metres of a planned eighty-six, its ramp still inside, its field of column stumps marking a prayer hall that was never roofed. Downstream, the Kasbah of the Udayas occupies a promontory above the Atlantic: a twelfth-century Almohad gate opens into narrow blue-and-white lanes, and a walled Andalusian garden was laid out in the seventeenth century when Iberian Muslim families settled the quarter. Chellah, a short drive inland, is a walled enclosure holding the ruins of Roman Sala and, above them, the tombs and minaret of a Merinid necropolis, with storks nesting on the walls. The modern city between them is broad, ordered and quiet by the standards of Moroccan capitals, and the beach runs out to the north.