Rabat - The undervisited Royal Capital
Rabat is one of the most underestimated capitals in the world. Visitors to Morocco who pass through it on the way between Casablanca and Fez tend to give it an afternoon — the mausoleum, the Hassan Tower, perhaps the kasbah — and then continue north. This is understandable and also, I believe, a mistake. Rabat is a city of considerable depth and genuine beauty, the kind of capital that reveals itself slowly, and the fact that it receives a fraction of the attention of Marrakesh or Fez adds to it’s enjoyment.
I have always found Rabat one of the more civilised cities in Morocco to spend time in. It has all the things that you’d expect in a capital city; — universities, museums, embassies, a film industry, an arts scene — without the overwhelming tourist density of the imperial cities. The medina is manageable. The ville nouvelle is handsome. The coastline is dramatic. The monuments are among the finest in the country.
From Pirate Haven to Royal Capital
Rabat’s history is longer and stranger than its relatively modern appearance suggests. The site has been occupied since neolithic times, and the Romans had a settlement here — traces of which survive in the ruins of the Chellah necropolis. The earliest Islamic city was built in the twelfth century by the Almohad sultan Yacoub el-Mansour, who intended Rabat — or Ribat el-Fath, the fortress of victory — to be the launch point for his campaigns in Spain and the capital of a new Almohad empire. He began building on an enormous scale: the great walls, the Hassan mosque, a minaret that would have been the tallest in the Islamic world. He died in 1199, and with him died the project. The mosque was never completed. The minaret — the Hassan Tower — stands alone.
In the seventeenth century, Rabat and its twin city Sale across the Oued Bouregreg became the base for the Barbary corsairs — pirates operating under the nominal authority of the Ottoman Empire, raiding European shipping and coastal settlements from Iceland to the Mediterranean. The Sale Rovers, as they were known, operated at a scale that made Rabat a genuinely significant maritime power for several decades. European hostages were held here. Jan Janszoon, a Dutch pirate who converted to Islam and became the Corsair admiral, operated from Sale. The corsair republic that governed both cities was, for a brief period, one of the most formidable naval powers in the western Mediterranean.
Rabat became the capital of the French Protectorate in 1912 and has remained the Moroccan capital through independence. The French urban planner Henri Prost designed the ville nouvelle that surrounds the historic city, and his plan — wide boulevards, European-style architecture, careful separation of old and new — has given modern Rabat a coherence and elegance that many colonial cities lack.
The Hassan Tower and the Mausoleum of Mohammed V
The Hassan Tower is the most dramatic monument in Rabat and one of the most affecting in Morocco. It was intended to be the minaret of the largest mosque in the world — begun by Yacoub el-Mansour in 1195, abandoned at his death in 1199, never completed. What remains is the tower — sixty metres high, built from pale sandstone in a pattern of interlaced arching — rising above a field of broken columns that are the remnants of the mosque’s prayer hall. The columns were toppled by the earthquake of 1755 and have been left where they fell. The effect is profoundly elegiac: a vision of what might have been, preserved in incompletion.
Adjacent to the tower, the Mausoleum of Mohammed V was built between 1962 and 1971 to house the tombs of King Mohammed V, who led Morocco’s independence, and his sons King Hassan II and Prince Moulay Abdallah. It is a work of contemporary Moroccan craftsmanship of the highest order: zellige floors, carved cedarwood ceilings, carved stucco walls and a roof of green tiles, the whole executed by craftsmen working in traditional techniques. The interior is open to visitors of all faiths, and the combination of the royal tombs — watched over by guards in ceremonial dress — and the quality of the architecture creates an atmosphere that is simultaneously imposing and strangely moving.
Visiting: The tower and mausoleum are best visited together in the morning, when the pale stone of the tower catches the Atlantic light from the west. Friday is the busiest day as the complex has particular significance for the Moroccan faithful.
The Kasbah of the Oudayas
The Kasbah of the Oudayas occupies a promontory above the mouth of the Oued Bouregreg, where the river meets the Atlantic. Built in the twelfth century by the Almohads as a military fortress and subsequently extended, it is now a residential neighbourhood of considerable charm: whitewashed houses with bright blue doors, lanes too narrow for cars, window boxes of geraniums, and at the end of the main street a garden — the Andalusian Garden, laid out in the seventeenth century in the Spanish style — that is one of the most pleasant places in Rabat for sitting quietly with a coffee.
From the kasbah’s seaward ramparts, the view takes in the Atlantic, the beach below, the medina of Sale across the river, and on a clear day, nothing but ocean to the west.
The Café Maure, embedded in the kasbah walls above the garden, serves mint tea and Moroccan pastries and has been doing so for long enough to have developed a comfortable sense of its own permanence. This is the Rabat that visitors who stay only for the monuments miss.
The Chellah Necropolis
The Chellah is one of the strangest and most beautiful places in Morocco. Originally a Phoenician trading post, then a Roman city — Sala Colonia — then abandoned for centuries and subsequently chosen by the Merinid dynasty in the fourteenth century as a royal necropolis, it is now a walled enclosure of ruins and gardens on the southern edge of the city.
Inside the walls, the Roman ruins — forum, columns, a triumphal arch — are partially excavated and partially overgrown. The Merinid structures — a mosque, a medersa, the royal tombs themselves — are in various states of picturesque decay. Storks have nested on every available tower and minaret for generations; their nests, enormous constructions of sticks, give the ruins a quality somewhere between abandoned and inhabited. Wild cats move through the undergrowth. The light, filtered through trees, falls differently here than anywhere else in Rabat.
The Chellah is not heavily visited, which is part of its character. It is quiet, slightly melancholy and completely extraordinary. It’s worth an hour of your time.
The Medina and the Ville Nouvelle
Rabat’s medina is among the most accessible in Morocco — smaller than Fez or Marrakesh, less disorienting, with an Andalusian character that reflects the community of Spanish Muslim refugees who settled here in the seventeenth century. The main commercial street, the Rue Souika, runs through the centre of the medina and contains everything from fabric merchants to silver jewellers to food vendors selling hot doughnuts from outdoor fryers. It is a genuine market, not a tourist construction, and the experience of shopping in it is accordingly more relaxed.
The ville nouvelle that Prost designed around the medina is worth exploring for its own sake. The wide Boulevard Mohammed V, lined with administrative buildings in a Franco-Moroccan style of considerable elegance, leads from the railway station to the medina gate. The terrace cafes along it are good for breakfast and better for watching the city go about its official business.
Rabat is a city of civil servants and diplomats and academics, and the culture this creates — measured, educated, less commercially intense than the tourist cities — gives it a particular tranquil quality that I find genuinely attractive.
I would recommend staying two nights in Rabat. See the Hassan Tower and mausoleum in the morning, the kasbah and Andalusian Garden in the afternoon, the Chellah the following morning.
Then spend some time just wandering and drinking tea, the perfect way to soak in the atmosphere.
And to full savour the vibe of the old city I would suggest eating in the medina on at least one of the evenings.