What are the best things to do in Casablanca?

Let me be honest from the start: Casablanca is not a pretty tourist town, and most visitors give it half a day before flying out. But the one thing that genuinely justifies a stop is the Hassan II Mosque, and it is extraordinary. It sits half over the Atlantic, its minaret is the tallest in Morocco, and crucially it is one of the only mosques in the country that admits non-Muslims on a guided tour. Booking that tour — the marble, the retractable roof, the sheer scale of the prayer hall — is the single best thing you can do here. Go in the morning light off the water.

After the mosque, I send people along the Corniche, the seafront strip in the Aïn Diab district. It is where Casablanca actually relaxes — joggers, families, cafés and ice-cream spots, and in the evening the bars and lounges that give the city its real nightlife. It is not a beautiful beach, but the sea air and the local crowd are a nice antidote to the traffic. Pair it with a coffee at one of the terrace cafés and you start to see the city the way Casablancans do, rather than as a tourist checklist.

For a sense of old-meets-new, walk the Habous quarter — the 'new medina' the French built in the 1930s, which blends Moroccan arches and souk lanes with a cleaner, calmer layout than the chaotic medinas of Fes or Marrakech. It is a relaxed place to buy olives, ceramics, and the famous Bennis pastries, and you will not be hassled the way you are inland. The Mahkama du Pacha nearby, when open, is a gorgeous administrative palace of carved cedar and zellij.

Two more honest picks. Rick's Café is a knowing recreation of the film's bar — it is a tourist trap, but a charming, well-done one, and the piano-and-cocktails atmosphere is genuinely fun if you do not take it too seriously. And the Art Deco downtown, around Place Mohammed V and the Boulevard, is a faded but fascinating walk for anyone who likes architecture; the old cinemas and façades are a reminder of Casablanca's 1930s heyday. Beyond that, treat the city as a one-day stop, not a base — the real magic is elsewhere in Morocco.