Rabat

The French chose Rabat as their administrative capital in 1912 for a specific reason: it was easier to control than Fes. The old imperial capital was too large, too politically complex, too theologically weighted. Rabat, by contrast, was modest — a walled city on a headland above the Bou Regreg river, with a twelfth-century tower that had never been finished and a Roman necropolis where storks nested. The French could build beside it without dismantling anything important. This calculation produced, inadvertently, the most liveable city in Morocco.

The Hassan Tower is the most recognisable monument in Rabat and one of the most misunderstood in Morocco. It was intended to be the minaret of the largest mosque in the world, commissioned by Sultan Yacoub al-Mansour in 1195. Al-Mansour died in 1199 and construction stopped. The tower stands at 44 metres; the intended height was 86 metres. The 312 columns around it are the foundations of a prayer hall that was never built. The earthquake of 1755 — the same earthquake that destroyed Lisbon and the Roman ruins at Volubilis — brought down whatever walls had been completed. What remains is not a ruin in the tragic sense. It is an unfinished argument about scale.

The Kasbah of the Udayas is a twelfth-century fortress at the mouth of the Bou Regreg, its gates some of the finest Almohad architecture in existence. Inside the walls, an Andalusian garden — formal, geometric, planted with citrus and roses — was laid out in the seventeenth century for Moorish refugees expelled from Spain. The quarter around the garden is painted blue and white in a tradition shared with Essaouira and Chefchaouen, the connection between them being the Andalusian communities who arrived with their colour preferences intact.

Chellah, fifteen minutes walk from the medina, is where Rabat becomes strange and specific. The Romans built a town here called Sala Colonia in the first century BCE. After the Romans left, the Merenid sultans of the thirteenth century built a necropolis over the ruins — graves of sultans and scholars inside Roman walls, with minarets rising from Roman foundations. Storks nest on every tower. In spring the storks arrive in February and the noise and mess they create is considerable and entirely indifferent to the architecture.

The Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, opened in 2014, holds the most significant collection of Moroccan modern art in the world and is visited by a fraction of the people who stand in line for the Bahia Palace in Marrakech. The collection runs from the early twentieth century to the present and is strong on the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca — a generation of painters who worked at the intersection of Amazigh abstraction and European modernism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Rabat works as a day trip from Casablanca — forty minutes by train, trains running every hour — but it rewards an overnight stay. The restaurants in Agdal and Hassan neighbourhoods are good, the prices are lower than Marrakech, and the medina is calm enough to walk without purpose.