The Tower That Never Finished

They started building in 1195. The sultan died in 1199. The tower stopped at 44 metres.

Yacoub al-Mansur, the Almohad caliph, wanted the largest mosque in the world. Not in the Islamic world — in the world. The plan called for a prayer hall large enough for his entire army to pray at once. The minaret was designed to reach 86 metres, taller than anything standing in Seville or Marrakech. The hypostyle hall would have held 40,000 worshippers.

He chose Rabat, a city he was rebuilding as a garrison capital for the campaigns into Spain. Construction began. Three hundred and forty-eight columns were erected for the prayer hall. The minaret rose, floor by floor, built in red sandstone with carved decoration on each face.

Then Yacoub al-Mansur died. He was 35. The mosque was abandoned immediately. No one who came after him had the resources or the will to complete it.

The 1755 earthquake — the same one that shattered Lisbon and damaged Chellah — brought down most of the columns and destroyed the prayer hall. What remains today is the tower, standing at roughly half its intended height, and the stumps of 348 columns arranged in rows across a stone platform. They look like a forest that has been cut to waist height.

The site was left open to the sky for centuries. In 1961, when Mohammed V died, his son Hassan II chose this spot for the royal mausoleum. The Mausoleum of Mohammed V now sits beside the unfinished tower, faced in white marble and green tile, guarded by mounted soldiers. The contrast is intentional: the tower that never finished beside the tomb of the king who finished modern Morocco.

Yacoub al-Mansur built two other towers from the same plan, scaled differently. One became the minaret of the Koutoubia in Marrakech. The other became the Giralda in Seville, later topped with a Renaissance belfry by the Spanish. Only the Rabat tower remains incomplete — a monument to what happens when a patron dies before his building does.