Casablanca Audio Tours

Casablanca's name comes from Portuguese -- Casa Branca, the White House -- bestowed after Portuguese traders razed the original Berber settlement of Anfa in 1468. Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah rebuilt it between 1756 and 1790, and then the French transformed it again after 1912 when urban planner Henri Prost deliberately engineered it as Morocco's commercial engine, shifting economic gravity away from ancient cities like Fez and Marrakech toward this Atlantic port. The result is a city unlike any other in North Africa: resolutely functional in ambition, architecturally modern in aspiration, with an old medina tucked to one side as if it belongs to a different chapter of the story.

The Hassan II Mosque, completed in 1993, sits directly on the Atlantic and can hold 105,000 worshippers inside and on its esplanade -- it is the largest mosque in Africa, and its 210-meter minaret projects a laser toward Mecca.

The Art Deco heritage from the French protectorate years survives around the Place Mohammed V, where 1930s Moroccan-modernist facades on banks and government buildings represent a fusion that never quite existed anywhere else. The Moroccan Jewish Museum, the only institution of its kind in the Arab world, holds photographs and artifacts from the Jewish community that numbered 80,000 in the 1940s before emigrating to Israel and France. Casablanca is too serious to be romantic in the Humphrey Bogart sense, which is partly what makes it interesting.