Curated Itinerary
Casablanca Art Deco: a walk through the Mauresque city
See Casablanca’s interwar Art Deco landmarks: the Palais de Justice, Wilaya Building, Cinema Rialto, Sacré-Cœur and Casa-Port station, all within a walkable central loop.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Palais de Justice de Casablanca to Gare de Casablanca-Port, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
This 3.5 km walk through central Casablanca takes about 165 minutes and links five buildings from the French Protectorate era. Each stop shows a different side of the Art Deco colonial style, from the civic formality of Place Mohammed V to the functional lines of the railway station. The route stays close to the main squares and broad avenues planned by Henri Prost, walking between sites that most visitors pass but rarely examine as a set.
Start at the Palais de Justice, completed in 1925, where the geometric facade of the courthouse sets the tone for the whole ensemble. Across the square, the Wilaya Building, built between 1928 and 1937 by Marius Boyer, adds horseshoe arches and zellige-inspired bands to the Deco grid. From there, the walk moves west to the former Sacré-Cœur church, finished in 1930, whose twin towers rise above Arab League Park.
The final stretch runs back east to Cinema Rialto, a working cinema from 1929, and then north to Casa-Port station, a 1920s terminal still in daily use. Spring and autumn are the most comfortable seasons for this walk, when the Atlantic light is clear and the streets around the port are not too hot. The whole route remains in the European quarter, away from the medina, and every building is still open to the public in some form.
Read the article
The magazine has a longer piece on this walk: Casablanca Art Deco: a walk through the Mauresque city.
Step by step
Palais de Justice de Casablanca
The Palais de Justice de Casablanca is a landmark courthouse situated on Place Mohammed V in the heart of Casablanca, Morocco. Completed in 1925 during the…
Wilaya Building
On Muhammad V Square in central Casablanca stands the Wilaya Building, an emblem of a city that rewrote itself in stone and concrete during the French…
Sacré-Cœur de Casablanca
The Sacré-Cœur de Casablanca — formally the Church of the Sacred Heart — is a landmark Art Deco structure designed by French architect Paul Tournon and…
Cinema Rialto
Cinema Rialto is one of the oldest surviving cinemas in Morocco, built in 1929 in the heart of Casablanca during the French Protectorate era. A…
Gare de Casablanca-Port
The Gare de Casablanca-Port, known in English as Casa-Port railway station, is one of the principal railway termini of Casablanca, Morocco, located in the…
Download for tour navigation
PDF is the stop list with GPS, to print or keep on the phone. GPX for Garmin / Komoot / OsmAnd. KML for Google Earth and Maps.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
To keep the route in the app instead of opening it once, download the KML above and import it into Google My Maps — Create a new map, then Import: the route then sits among your own maps in Google Maps, with the stops and our notes attached to each one.