Rabat Travel Guide: Morocco's Capital in 1–2 Days

The Hassan Tower is a 44-metre minaret from an Almohad mosque that was never finished: Sultan Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur began it in 1191, died before the work was done, and the site keeps the tower and a field of columns. It was meant to be the tallest minaret in the world; what stands today is a pink stone sentinel over the city.

In front of it, the Mausoleum of Mohammed V was built between 1961 and 1971 to hold the sultan who brought Morocco to independence, his son Hassan II and Prince Abdallah. It is free to enter and open to visitors of all faiths, and the white marble, green-tiled roof and guards on horseback make it the most ceremonial ten minutes in the capital. The two monuments share one esplanade; count on an hour.

A short ride from the centre, the Chellah is a Marinid burial site inside a Roman ruin: first a trading port on the river, then the Roman city of Sala Colonia, then a place the Marinid sultans chose for their dead in the late 13th century. The gate dates to 1339, and inside, cracked columns and walls look as though the garden grew over them on purpose.

White storks nest on the broken towers, and a freshwater spring feeds a pool of eels that visitors still feed today. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 added to the damage, and the whole place keeps a drowsy, untouristed calm that almost no other Moroccan monument can match. Half an hour is enough; an hour is better.

At the mouth of the Bou Regreg, a 12th-century Almohad fortress commands the spot where the river meets the Atlantic. The Kasbah of the Udayas, named for the Oudaya tribe that Sultan Moulay Ismail settled here in the 18th century, opens through the monumental Bab Oudaia into streets of blue-and-white houses remade by Andalusian refugees in the 1600s.

Two things repay the climb: the Andalusian Gardens, laid out in 1915–1918 and kept fiercely green, and the terrace above the river mouth, where you look across to Salé and out to the waves. Take mint tea at the Moorish café at the top, then wander down to the riverbank below.

Rabat's medina is small, walkable and refreshingly unpressured. Its 12th-century walls keep the shape of the Almohad town, the gates of Bab er-Rouah and Bab el-Had still mark the old entry points, and the streets inside run from the kasbah toward the sea, lined with working shops: jewellers, weavers, fabric and metalwork stalls.

Unlike the great souks of Fez or Marrakech, it rewards browsing more than bargaining, and the pace is easy enough that you can drift for an hour without being courted. Come in the morning for the food halls and a slower afternoon for the artisan lanes.

When the French Protectorate made Rabat its capital in 1912, the city was rebuilt as a showpiece: wide avenues, gardens, a parliament, ministries and white apartment blocks in Art Deco and Moorish styles. The result is the layer UNESCO calls a 'shared heritage', a colonial plan absorbed into a Moroccan capital, still the country's seat of government today.

Avenue Mohammed V runs as the spine from the old gates toward the river, and this is where the capital's life moves at its official, unhurried pace. Walk it in the late afternoon, past the Parliament building and the long municipal gardens, and you understand why Rabat feels more like a capital than any other Moroccan city.

The short river that separates Rabat from its twin, Salé, is a ten-minute crossing, and Salé is worth the trip: an older, lower-key medina, fish grills by the water, and a corsair history that put the town's name, as 'Sallee', into old English sailing logs. Its walls and souks see a fraction of Rabat's visitors.

Cross by tram or petit taxi, spend a couple of hours on the Salé bank, and come back as the light drops. The two cities read together as the capital region they form, and the crossing itself, river on one side, Atlantic at the mouth, is half the appeal.

Rabat eats well without ceremony. The Atlantic gives the city a serious fish habit, and the grill houses near the river and coast serve sardines, sea bream and squid at prices the resort towns cannot touch. The street food is honest and the queues are short.

For sit-down meals, the medina and the new town serve Moroccan cooking without the theatre of Marrakech, plus a handful of French brasserie survivors from the Protectorate years. Ignore the lists of 'the' restaurant; follow instead the places where the office crowd eats lunch, whose short menus change with the catch.