Casablanca

The film was shot in Burbank. The café that appears in Casablanca does not exist in Casablanca and never did. Warner Bros. used a studio backlot in 1942, and the Morocco that appears on screen is a set designer's composite of things Americans expected Morocco to look like. The real Casablanca — Morocco's largest city, its commercial engine, home to four million people — has almost nothing to do with the film. This is either a disappointment or a relief depending on what you came for.

The Hassan II Mosque is the third-largest mosque in the world and the only mosque in Morocco that non-Muslims are permitted to enter. It was built between 1986 and 1993 on a platform extending into the Atlantic Ocean — the floor of the prayer hall is glass, so the faithful pray above the sea. The minaret stands 210 metres tall, the second-tallest minaret in the world, tipped with a laser that points toward Mecca. On Fridays it holds 25,000 worshippers inside; the esplanade surrounding it holds another 80,000. The architect was Michel Pinseau, a Frenchman.

The architecture most visitors miss is the Mauresque style that defines the downtown built between 1920 and 1950: a French colonial invention that combined Art Deco geometry with Moroccan ornament — horseshoe arches, zellige tile, carved plaster — applied to the facades of banks, post offices, and department stores. The Boulevard Mohammed V is the densest concentration. The buildings are largely intact and almost entirely unvisited. The Central Market, a covered hall in Mauresque style from 1917, sells the freshest fish in a city that arrives at the ocean's edge.

The Quartier des Habous — the 'New Medina' — was built by the French colonial administration in the 1930s to look like a traditional Moroccan medina. The intention was partly functional (housing for rural migrants) and partly ideological (a demonstration that French planners understood Moroccan urbanism). The result is genuinely pleasant: arcaded streets, a mosque, a souk for books and religious goods, a patisserie quarter where msemen and chebakia are made in quantities that suggest industrial process but are produced entirely by hand.

Anfa, the wealthy hill neighbourhood above the city, is where the Casablanca Conference took place in January 1943 — Churchill and Roosevelt dividing the post-war world while staying in villas requisitioned for the purpose. The villas are private now. A small plaque on the Anfa Hotel marks the general location.

Casablanca is the point of entry for flights from North America (Royal Air Maroc operates direct routes from New York, Montreal, and Washington), making it the practical first stop for many visitors arriving from the west. The train to Marrakech takes three hours. The train to Rabat takes forty minutes. The city itself warrants at minimum half a day — more if the Mauresque architecture interests you or if the fish is good at the Central Market, which it almost always is.