What are the best things to do in Rabat?

Rabat packs its best experiences into a tight, walkable core, which is part of why I love it for travellers who want sightseeing without exhaustion. Here is how I sequence a day on the ground.

Start at the Kasbah of the Udayas while the morning light is soft. You enter through a monumental almohad gate and lose yourself in lanes washed in cobalt and white, ending at a platform that looks out over the Bou Regreg river mouth and the ocean. Inside there is a quiet Andalusian garden and a café where you can take a mint tea and a Moroccan pastry above the water — one of the most peaceful half-hours in any Moroccan city. From there, drop down into the medina, which spills toward the sea: it is a real, lived-in market, lighter on the hard sell, lovely for textiles and leather.

In the afternoon, pair the two great monuments that face each other across a vast plaza: the Hassan Tower, a soaring unfinished minaret ringed by hundreds of stone columns from a mosque that was never completed, and the Mausoleum of Mohammed V, an exquisitely decorated royal tomb you can enter, with ceremonial guards on horseback at the gates. Then make time for the Chellah on the city's southern edge — a romantic, overgrown walled complex layering Roman ruins and Islamic tombs, where storks nest on the minarets. It is my personal favourite corner of the city.

To round things out, I send people to the modern Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art for a different side of Morocco, or simply down to the Corniche and the river-mouth beaches for sunset. If you have a second day, cross the river to Salé, Rabat's older twin town, for a more traditional, untouristed medina. None of this requires a car — taxis are cheap and short, and most of it links on foot.