Casablanca

The currency is the Moroccan dirham (MAD), and it's a closed currency, which catches out anyone who finds this out on the way home: you can bring in and take out only up to 2,000 MAD, and outside Morocco exchange is poor or nonexistent. Exchange on arrival, keep the receipt and convert back at the airport before passport control. In 2026 the euro is worth roughly 10.5–11 MAD and the dollar 9–10 MAD. Price ranges in 2026: nous-nous or espresso 12–20 MAD; sfenj 2–4; msemen 3–8; harira 8–15; plate of grilled sardines or a sandwich 30–60; lunch at a working-class restaurant 50–90; dinner in Gauthier or Maârif 180–400 per person without alcohol; beer at a licensed bar 40–70; tram ticket 8–9; three-star hotel in the center 500–900 MAD a night. Add the tourist promotion tax, charged per person per night by the hotel, between about 15 and 30 MAD depending on the category. Cash rules: cards work in hotels, chains and larger restaurants, but the medina, taxis, sfenj carts and neighborhood cafés are cash only. ATMs are on every corner and charge foreign cards a withdrawal fee of about 20–30 MAD; always decline the “conversion into your currency” offered on screen. Tipping: round the taxi fare up, leave 5–10% at sit-down restaurants and 2–5 MAD for the parking attendant in a yellow vest, a recognized job in the city.

Mohammed V airport has a train station under the terminal

Mohammed V Airport (CMN) is in Nouaceur, 30 km southeast of the city, and the best way out is right under the terminal, where there's a train station. The Al Bidaoui line reaches Casa Voyageurs in about 35–40 minutes and continues to Casa Port and Rabat, with departures roughly every hour between 6am and 10pm, for around 45 MAD in second class. Airport taxis charge a fixed fare of around 300 MAD by day and more at night; agree on it before you get in, or book through an app. Casa Voyageurs is the long-distance station: Al Boraq, the high-speed train opened in November 2018, reaches Rabat in about 50 minutes and Tangier in 2 hours 10 minutes (second class roughly 230–350 MAD, depending on how far ahead you book). For Rabat there's also the TNR, every 30 minutes, taking about 1 hour for around 40 MAD. Casa Port, rebuilt in 2014, serves the coastal line and is a ten-minute walk from the medina. Long-distance CTM and Supratours buses leave from the terminal on Rue Leon l'Africain.

The tram has been the backbone since 2012

Within the city, the backbone is the Casa Transport tram, with more than 100 km of network today: T1 in 2012, T2 in 2019, T3, T4 and two busway corridors (BW1 and BW2) together in 2024. A single ticket costs about 8–9 MAD, two rides come to about 16 MAD, and with the rechargeable card (15 MAD for the card, valid for 5 years) a ride drops to 6 MAD. There's a 24-hour pass for around 50 MAD and a three-day pass for around 120 MAD (prices adopted in 2024, check at the ticket office). Buses, run by Alsa, cost about 5 MAD and are slower. Casablanca's petits taxis are red, carry at most three passengers and are shared by default: the driver stops along the way and picks up someone else heading the same direction, and that's normal, not a scam. They must use the meter, so ask for the “compteur” before you close the door. The flag fare is around 8 MAD, there's a surcharge of about 50% between 8pm and 6am, and a ride across the center rarely tops 30 MAD. Grands taxis are white, carry six people and run fixed intercity routes. Apps that work: inDrive, Careem, Roby, Heetch and Yassir; Uber returned to Morocco on November 27, 2025, with drivers from licensed tourist-transport companies only. The center and the medina are walkable, but the Corniche is too far to reach on foot from downtown: to get to the sea, take the T2 to its final station, Aïn Diab Plage, at the tip of the waterfront. Cycling is uncomfortable because there's no continuous bike lane.

Casablanca is a big, working city: violent crime against foreigners is rare, and street theft runs above the Moroccan average. The concrete risk is pickpockets and bag-snatchers, and it has a time and place: standing on a crowded tram, outside the Marché Central, on the medina's narrow streets and along the Corniche after dark. Carry your bag in front, keep your phone in a front pocket, and don't walk with your phone in hand near the curb, since motorbike snatching happens. Fake guides approach in the medina and at the entrance to the Hassan II Mosque offering a “shortcut” or “ticket”: the answer is a “la, shukran” without breaking stride, and the mosque ticket is only bought at the foundation's booth. Women traveling alone report frequent verbal harassment, especially at night and in outlying neighborhoods; a firm pace and not engaging work better than arguing. Avoid walking after 11pm through empty stretches between downtown and Aïn Diab, in the port area and in outlying neighborhoods you don't know: taxis and apps are cheap and solve that. Minor scams: a “broken” meter, wrong change with the similar-looking 20 and 200 dirham notes, and a rug shop that serves tea before letting you leave. Note the emergency numbers: 19 (urban police), 15 (ambulance), 177 (gendarmerie outside cities). Tap water is treated and safe to drink in the city, though many people prefer bottled for the taste of chlorine. Brazilians don't need a visa for stays of up to 90 days. Check entry requirements before flying, since Morocco has been expanding electronic authorization requirements for other nationalities.

The right hand and the gesture to the heart

Greet with your right hand and then bring your hand to your chest; the gesture counts more than the strength of the handshake. Between a man and a woman, wait for her to offer her hand first: many prefer just the hand-to-heart gesture, and that isn't coldness.

During Ramadan, avoid eating on the street by day

Even if you're not fasting, eating, drinking or smoking on the sidewalk in daylight is offensive and technically illegal. Hotels serve as usual, and so do some tourist restaurants, behind a curtain over the door; use those instead of a park bench.

You decline the offer before accepting

Tea, food and rides are offered by reflex, and etiquette calls for declining once or twice before saying yes. Refusing flatly the first time is what comes across as rude; a “shukran, bezzaf” with your hand on your chest ends the exchange without offending anyone.

Bargain in the souk, not at the café

Prices get negotiated at a medina stall, in Habous, in Derb Ghallef and at a rug shop. They don't get negotiated at a café, bakery, pharmacy, a shop with a price tag, or a taxi with the meter running: asking for a discount there embarrasses the seller.

Ask before taking a photo

Photographing people without asking, especially women and vendors, causes immediate friction; a gesture and a smile are usually enough to ask. Don't photograph the port, military installations, the police, or close-up the official buildings on Place Mohammed V.

Alcohol exists, but discreetly

Alcohol is sold in licensed bars, hotels and a separate section of some supermarkets; Casablanca and Flag beers are local, as is the vin gris from Boulaouane. Don't drink on the street or walk around with a bottle in view, and know that sales to Moroccans are suspended during Ramadan.

The 1942 film was shot in a studio

Looking for the film's “Rick's Café” as a historic landmark. It never existed: every scene was shot in a studio in California, without a single image of the real city. The bar of the same name was opened in 2004 by a former American diplomat, in a 1930s riad on Boulevard Sour Jdid, and it's a decent restaurant, just not a historic one.

Thinking it's the capital

This is the economic capital: the port, the stock exchange and much of the country's industry are here. The government and the embassies are in Rabat.

Petit taxi without a meter

Getting into a petit taxi without insisting on the meter. Refusing the “compteur” and then quoting an inflated fixed price is the city's most common friction: say “compteur afak” before you close the door and, if the driver refuses, get out and take another one. Remember too that taxis are shared by default, so someone getting in partway through the ride is normal, not a scam, even if it may feel like you got into the wrong car.

Hassan II outside visiting hours

Showing up at the Hassan II Mosque outside visiting hours. You can only see the interior on an official guided tour, at about four time slots a day that change on Fridays and during Ramadan. Outside those, you can only enter the esplanade, which now also charges admission. Arrive twenty minutes early, buy at the foundation's ticket office and bring ID.

Leaving the country with dirhams in your pocket

Counting on cards for everything and leaving the country with dirhams in your pocket. The medina, taxis, food carts and neighborhood cafés only take cash, and dirhams can't be taken out in quantity or exchanged at a reasonable rate abroad. Spend what's left while still in the country, or exchange it back at the departure area, before passport control.

السلام عليكم: s-salamu 3alaykum (salamu aleikum)

Hello, literally “peace be upon you”; the reply is “wa 3alaykum s-salam”

شكرا / بارك الله فيك: shukran / barak Allahu fik (baraka-lahu fik)

Thank you; the second form is warmer and widely used in Casablanca

بشحال؟: bshhal? (bech-hal)

How much is it? The question that opens any purchase in the medina

عافاك: 3afak (afak)

Please; tacked onto any request, as in “l-hsab afak,” the bill, please

واخا: wakha (wa-kha, with the kh scraped in the throat)

Okay, agreed; used to accept, agree and close a conversation

بزاف: bezzaf (be-zaf)

Too much, a lot; “ghali bezzaf” means “too expensive” and is the phrase that opens the bargaining

The plateau, the sea and the mild climate

Casablanca sits on a low limestone plateau (the Chaouia plain, between 0 and 120 m) along about 30 km of Atlantic coast running southwest-northeast. No river crosses downtown: the only watercourse, the Oued Bouskoura, was diverted and buried over the course of the 20th century and now runs almost entirely underground, beneath the city and the airport area. The cold Canary Current is what keeps this climate mild, in a city at the latitude of Beirut and Los Angeles: it pushes in the morning fog and holds back the heat that punishes Morocco's interior in the same season.

Prost's fan-shaped grid

The grid is Prost's: a triangular medina of about 50 hectares wedged between the port and Place des Nations Unies; a center of fan-shaped boulevards from that square (Mohammed V, Hassan II, Félix Houphouët-Boigny); two ring roads, Zerktouni and Anfa, followed by Boulevard de la Résistance and the bypass; industry pushed east (Aïn Sebaâ, Sidi Bernoussi) and upper-income housing to the west (Anfa, Aïn Diab), a divide still legible in the price per square meter.

The port, the distant beach and the water

The port, Morocco's largest, occupies 6 km of coastline right north of downtown. That's why downtown has almost no sea view, and why the beach city, on the Aïn Diab Corniche, only starts 5 km to the west. Since the drought that set in in 2018, the water supply has relied on a transfer from the Oum Er-Rbia and a large desalination plant under construction on the coast to the southwest, sized for about 300 million m³ a year.

Urban music: from Nass El Ghiwane to Casablanca rap

Moroccan urban popular music was born in a working-class neighborhood of this city. Around 1970, in Hay Mohammadi, Larbi Batma, Boujemaâ Hgour, Omar Sayed and Allal Yaâla formed Nass El Ghiwane: they traded the orchestra for the bendir and the guembri and sang zawiya poetry about unemployment, exile and injustice. Martin Scorsese called them “Africa's Rolling Stones” and picked Ahmed El Maânouni's documentary about them, “Transes” (1981), as the first title restored by his World Cinema Foundation, in 2007. Casablanca also created the L'Boulevard festival in 1999, which gave a stage to metal, rap and fusion and named the scene known as Nayda: in 2003, fourteen young metalheads from the city were even arrested for “satanism” and released after public protest. Today Moroccan rap is almost entirely a Casablanca product: Don Bigg, Dizzy DROS, Shayfeen, ElGrandeToto and Stormy sing in darija to audiences of tens of millions.

The Casablanca School and concrete architecture

In art and architecture, the city made two breaks with tradition. The first is the Casablanca School: Farid Belkahia ran the School of Fine Arts from 1962 to 1974 with Mohamed Melehi and Mohammed Chabâa, took painting out of the gallery (in 1969 they hung the works in Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech) and linked modern abstraction to the signs of Moroccan craft; the magazine Souffles, founded by Abdellatif Laâbi in 1966, was the written half of the movement. The second is the defense of 20th-century heritage: the Casamémoire association, founded in 1995, halted demolitions in the art deco center and runs a free guided-tour weekend every year. In cinema, it was here that Moroccan film turned urban and began speaking darija: Nabil Ayouch (“Ali Zaoua,” 2000; “Horses of God,” 2012; “Casablanca Beats,” in competition at Cannes in 2021), Nour-Eddine Lakhmari (“Casanegra,” 2008) and Maryam Touzani (“Adam,” 2019, shot in the old medina).

Soccer splits the weekend

Soccer sets the rhythm of the weekend. Two clubs split the city and the Stade Mohammed V, opened in 1955 with about 45,000 seats: Wydad Athletic Club, founded in 1937, in red, and Raja Club Athletic, founded in 1949, in green, historically the team of the working-class neighborhoods. Both have won the CAF Champions League (Raja in 1989, 1997 and 1999, Wydad in 1992, 2017 and 2022) and their organized supporter groups, Winners and Ultras Eagles, produce songs that spill out of the stadium: “Fi Bladi Delmouni,” sung in 2018 about unemployment and emigration, became a national protest anthem. Morocco hosted the Africa Cup of Nations from December 21, 2025 to January 18, 2026 and co-hosts the 2030 World Cup with Spain and Portugal; the 115,000-seat Grand Stade Hassan II is being built in Benslimane, 45 km to the northeast.

“Horses of God,” Mahi Binebine (2010)

A novel narrated by one of the young men from the Sidi Moumen neighborhood who carried out the May 16, 2003 attacks, written by the Moroccan painter and writer Mahi Binebine, born in Marrakech. It explains in two hundred pages the distance between the art deco center and the periphery that feeds it; adapted by Nabil Ayouch as “Horses of God” (2012).

“Casanegra,” Nour-Eddine Lakhmari (2008)

Two friends in their early twenties cross the city at night, from the port to Maârif, speaking darija start to finish. It's the film that broke with the tourist image and opened the wave of Moroccan urban cinema, and the cinematography is the best record of Casablanca's rainy winter.

Nass El Ghiwane, 1970s records, and “Transes” (1981)

Nass El Ghiwane, the most influential group in modern Moroccan music. “Transes” (1981), by Ahmed El Maânouni, films them live in their formative years, and it's the documentary Martin Scorsese's restoration foundation chose to launch its work with in 2007.