Old Medina (Ancienne Medina)

The Old Medina, known locally as the Ancienne Medina, is the historic core of Casablanca, lying beside the old port along Boulevard des Almohades in Morocco's Casablanca-Settat region. The settlement of Anfa was destroyed by the Portuguese in 1468, and the town was refounded as Dar el Beida in the late 18th century by Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, who built a fortified port town after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Portuguese departure from nearby coastal strongholds. The Alaouite sultan fortified the harbour with the Sqala bastion and ramparts, and the town grew through the 19th century as a port exporting wool and grain, with European and Moroccan merchants, including a notable Jewish community. French forces bombarded the town in 1907 and occupied it, after which the colonial administration built the new city beyond the walls, leaving the medina as a more modest residential and commercial quarter. Compared with the medinas of Fez or Marrakech it is small and rather lived-in than monumental. Narrow whitewashed lanes, small mosques, neighbourhood bakeries, spice sellers, fish stalls and clothing shops form a working district rather than a museum. The walls, the Bab Marrakech gate and the Ould El Hamra minaret are the principal surviving landmarks, while pockets of older houses show Moroccan courtyard planning. Conservation has been uneven, and some buildings have deteriorated, though restoration of ramparts and public spaces has been undertaken in recent decades. Visitors can enter at any time, and shops usually keep hours of roughly 9am to 7pm, with quieter streets on Fridays. The medina is best read as a window into everyday Casablanca and into the layered history of the city before its colonial expansion and its twentieth-century boom.