8 Best Places to Visit on Casablanca Tours (2026 Travel Guide)

01 Hassan II Mosque, Casablanca

You will see the minaret before you see anything else in Casablanca. At 210 metres it is among the tallest in the world, and it stands on a platform that reaches out over the Atlantic, so at high tide the sea is directly beneath part of the prayer hall. This is the only mosque in Morocco that non-Muslim visitors may enter, which makes it a rare opportunity rather than just a photo stop.

History

Commissioned by King Hassan II and completed in 1993, it took roughly seven years to build and drew on the work of thousands of Moroccan craftsmen. The materials were sourced almost entirely within the country: cedar from the Middle Atlas, marble from Agadir, granite from Tafraout. The intention was explicit, to build something on the water because of a line in the Quran describing God’s throne upon the water.

Highlights

• The main prayer hall, which holds tens of thousands of worshippers under a retractable cedar roof.
• Hand-carved cedar ceilings and zellij tilework at a scale you will not see again on the route.
• The hammam and ablution level below, usually included on the guided visit.
• The vast open esplanade, which is where locals gather in the evening.

Best time to visit

Interior access is by guided tour only, on set times that shift with prayer schedules, the season and Ramadan. Late afternoon is the sweet spot: the western facade faces the ocean and takes the light beautifully, and you can walk the Corniche afterwards for dinner. Fridays have reduced visiting hours.

Photography tips

Shoot from the northern side of the esplanade for the classic minaret and ocean composition. Bring a wide lens for the interior, where the ceiling is the subject and a standard lens will not hold it. Sunset from the seawall, with the mosque backlit, is the frame most people come for and almost nobody plans for.

Nearby attractions

The Corniche at Ain Diab for seafood, the Art Deco streets around Boulevard Mohammed V, the Habous quarter for its bookshops and pastry stalls, and Rick’s Café if you want the film association, though the film itself was shot on a California backlot.

02 Chefchaouen, the Blue City

Chefchaouen is a small town in the Rif Mountains where almost every wall, step and doorframe is painted some shade of blue. Founded in 1471, it spent centuries closed to outsiders and still feels apart from the rest of Morocco: cooler air, a slower pace, mountain light. It is the one stop on this route that travellers consistently wish they had given more time.

The blue medina

The colour has several competing explanations. The most commonly repeated is that Jewish refugees who settled here in the 1930s brought the tradition of blue as a symbol of the sky. Others will tell you it repels mosquitoes, or simply that it keeps houses cool. Locals repaint by hand each year, which is why the shades vary from lane to lane, and why the town looks nothing like a preserved museum piece.

Things to do

• Walk the medina before 9am, when the lanes belong to cats, bread deliveries and residents.
• Visit the fifteenth century kasbah and its gardens on Outa el Hammam square.
• Watch weavers at work. Chefchaouen wool blankets are made here rather than imported, and the workshops welcome visitors without pressure.
• Climb to the Spanish Mosque on the hill east of town, a twenty five minute walk, for sunset over the whole blue medina.
• Hike toward the Akchour waterfalls if you have a spare half day and decent shoes.

Best photo spots

The stepped alley off Rue Bin Souaki with its potted plants is the frame that fills Instagram, and it is busy from mid-morning. Better options: the lanes below the kasbah at first light, the doorway arches on Callejón El Asri, and the panorama from the Spanish Mosque an hour before sunset. Ask before photographing people, and expect a polite no from some older residents.

03 Fes, the Medieval Medina

Fes is the oldest of Morocco’s imperial cities and the one that changes how people think about the country. Founded in the eighth century, it has been a centre of learning, craft and religion for well over a thousand years, and unlike much of Morocco it has not been softened for visitors. It is intense, disorienting and, for a lot of our guests, the highlight of the whole trip.

The ancient medina

Fes el Bali is the largest car-free urban area in the world. Roughly nine thousand lanes, no vehicles, and donkeys still carrying goods through alleys too narrow for anything else. You will get lost. Everybody does. This is the one destination on the route where we insist on a licensed local guide, not because the medina is dangerous but because without one you will spend your day navigating rather than looking.

Within it: Al Quaraouiyine, founded in 859 and widely described as the oldest continuously operating university in the world; the Bou Inania and Al Attarine medersas, with carved cedar, stucco and zellij worth twenty minutes each on their own; the Nejjarine fountain and its woodwork museum; and the ornate Blue Gate at Bab Boujloud, which is where most visits begin.

Traditional tanneries

The Chouara tannery is the image people associate with Fes: stone vats of dye in ochre, red and white, worked by hand exactly as they were centuries ago. You view it from the terraces of the leather shops that surround it, and you will be handed a sprig of mint at the door, which you will want. The smell is real. Go in the morning, when the light reaches down into the vats and the work is underway. Afternoon light leaves half the courtyard in shadow.

Nobody is obliged to buy anything. If you do want leather, this is the place on the route where quality is highest and where bargaining is expected as a normal, friendly transaction.

Cultural experiences

• A cooking class in a riad, which in Fes usually starts with the market rather than the kitchen.
• Ceramic workshops in the Ain Nokbi quarter, where the blue Fassi pottery is thrown, glazed and hand-chipped into mosaic.
• Brass and copper hammering in Place Seffarine, which you hear before you find.
• A traditional hammam, which is a genuinely local ritual rather than a spa treatment.

Two nights is our standard recommendation. One night is workable. Half a day does not justify the drive.

04 Merzouga and the Sahara Desert

Merzouga is the village at the edge of Erg Chebbi, a dune sea with crests reaching around 150 metres that rises out of flat stony desert with almost no warning. For most travellers this is the reason the trip exists, and it is the one destination that reliably exceeds expectations rather than meeting them.

The camel trek

The classic arrival is by camel in the late afternoon, roughly ninety minutes into the dunes, reaching camp as the light goes gold. It is slower and more uncomfortable than people imagine, and that is part of it. If a camel is not right for you, for reasons of back, hip, pregnancy or simple preference, we drive guests to camp by 4×4 instead and nobody thinks anything of it. You still get the sunset, from a dune rather than a saddle.

Wear long trousers, closed shoes and a scarf. Take a small overnight bag only. Your main luggage stays with the vehicle and meets you the next morning.

The desert camp

Camps sit on a spectrum. A standard camp means Berber tents, a shared bathroom block, rugs, a communal dinner and drumming around the fire. A luxury camp means an en-suite tent with a real bed, hot water, lanterns and a private terrace facing the dunes. The gap in comfort is significant, and it matters most between November and February, when nights are cold.

Dinner is usually tagine and soup cooked on site, followed by Berber music around a fire. The stargazing is not marketing language. With no light pollution for a hundred kilometres, the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye on any clear night, and the camp lanterns go out early precisely so you can see it.

Sunrise and sunset

Sunset is the arrival, when the dunes shift from yellow through orange to deep red and the ridgelines sharpen. Sunrise is the better of the two and the one people nearly miss. Climb the dune behind camp about thirty minutes before first light. The sand runs grey, then pink, then gold, and the wind pattern from the night before is still perfectly intact until the first footprints cross it.

One night gives you both. Two nights gives you a full free day in the desert: Gnaoua musicians in the village of Khamlia, mint tea with a nomad family, the fossil beds around Erfoud, sandboarding, and a second sunrise. If the Sahara is your main reason for coming, book the second night.

05 Todra Gorge

Leaving the Sahara, the road follows palm groves west and then turns north into a crack in the High Atlas. Todra Gorge is a limestone canyon whose walls rise around 300 metres on either side of a river bed that narrows to about ten metres at its tightest point. Driving into it is genuinely startling, because the temperature drops and the sky becomes a strip.

Hiking

You do not need to be a hiker. The floor of the gorge is flat, shaded and walkable in ordinary shoes, and an hour there and back covers the dramatic section. If you want more, a marked trail climbs the eastern side toward the plateau and gives a view down the length of the canyon in about ninety minutes. Rock climbers come here for the bolted routes on the west wall, and watching them is part of the entertainment.

Go late morning. Early and the gorge floor is in full shadow, late and the tour groups from Marrakech have arrived.

Berber villages

The approach through Tinghir is as good as the gorge itself. The palmeraie here runs for kilometres, an unbroken green ribbon along the river with earthen villages built up the slopes on either side. These are working agricultural communities, not display villages: date palms, alfalfa, small irrigation channels that have been maintained collectively for centuries.

If your driver offers to stop at a village rather than at the gorge car park, say yes. That is where the interesting hour is.

Scenic landscapes

Todra pairs naturally with the Dades Valley, an hour and a half west, where rose-coloured rock formations locals call the monkey fingers rise beside the road and the Dades gorge road climbs in a set of switchbacks that has become one of the most photographed stretches of tarmac in Morocco. Most itineraries do both on the same day and overnight in a kasbah hotel in the Dades.

06 Ait Ben Haddou

A ksar is a fortified village, and Ait Ben Haddou is the finest surviving example in Morocco: earthen towers and kasbahs stacked against a hillside above the Ounila river, with a granary at the summit. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1987 and you will recognise it long before you are told why.

Kasbah history

The ksar sat on the caravan route that carried salt, gold and slaves north from the Sahara toward Marrakech, and its defensive shape follows from that: a single fortified entrance, high blank walls, communal granary at the top. Most of the standing buildings date from the seventeenth century onward, though the site has been occupied far longer. Around half a dozen families still live inside; most of the community moved to the modern village across the river decades ago.

The construction is pisé, rammed earth mixed with straw, which is why the whole ksar is the same colour as the hill it stands on and why it needs constant maintenance. After heavy rain, sections have to be rebuilt by hand.

Movie locations

It has stood in for ancient Egypt, Jerusalem, Rome and half a dozen invented worlds. Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Would Be King, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Mummy, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Game of Thrones have all shot here or nearby. Twenty minutes down the road, Ouarzazate holds the Atlas Studios, which you can tour if the film history interests you and skip without regret if it does not.

Visiting it well

Cross the river on the stepping stones or the footbridge, climb to the granary at the top for the valley view, and come down through the lanes rather than the way you went up. Allow two hours, three if you want the summit at a slow pace.

Timing is everything here, exactly as in Chefchaouen. Coach groups arrive from Marrakech in the late morning. Arrive before ten or after four and you will have long stretches of it to yourself. On a two week route we overnight across the river, which lets you walk over at dawn with nobody else on the hill.

07 The Atlas Mountains

A Casablanca route crosses three separate mountain systems, and travellers often do not realise they are distinct. The Rif in the north is green, wooded and Mediterranean. The Middle Atlas is cedar forest and alpine meadow. The High Atlas is bare rock, snow in winter and the highest peaks in North Africa. Each one changes the weather in the car within an hour.

Panoramic views

The two crossings that matter are the Middle Atlas between Fes and the desert, and the High Atlas on the final approach to Marrakech. The first takes you through Ifrane, an alpine-looking town built in the 1930s and nicknamed the Switzerland of Morocco, then into the cedar forest near Azrou where troops of wild Barbary macaques live beside the road. Do not feed them, however tempting. It makes them aggressive toward the next group.

The second is the Tizi n’Tichka pass, Morocco’s highest major road at over 2,200 metres, which climbs in long switchbacks with viewpoints at nearly every bend. It is the single best drive on the route.

Berber culture

The Atlas is where Amazigh culture is most visible: villages of the same earth as the slopes they sit on, terraced fields, walnut and almond groves, communal granaries, and a language that is not Arabic. Most of our own drivers and guides come from these valleys. A lunch stop in a High Atlas village on the Tizi n’Tichka is standard on our routes and is usually where the best conversations of the trip happen.

If you want to walk in the mountains rather than drive through them, the Ourika Valley and Imlil are both within a couple of hours of Marrakech, and Imlil is the trailhead for Toubkal, North Africa’s highest peak at 4,167 metres. Either works as a day trip on a longer itinerary.

Mountain passes, practically

The roads are paved and in good condition, but they wind. Anyone prone to motion sickness should sit in the front and take something before the climb begins rather than halfway up. In winter, snow occasionally closes the Tizi n’Tichka for a few hours; there is a tunnel section now that has made closures far rarer. Temperatures at the pass can be fifteen degrees below what you left in the valley, so keep a layer within reach rather than in the boot.

08 Marrakech

Marrakech is where most Casablanca routes end, and it is the destination that suffers most from being rushed. Founded in 1070, it has been a Berber trading capital, an imperial seat and, more recently, the city that everyone photographs. It is loud, hot, theatrical and enormously enjoyable if you sequence the day correctly.

Jemaa el Fna

The main square is a UNESCO-recognised piece of intangible cultural heritage rather than a monument, which is an odd designation until you stand in it. By day it is orange juice carts and snake charmers. From roughly six in the evening it fills with food stalls, storytellers, musicians and crowds, and it becomes one of the great public spaces anywhere.

Here is the sequencing advice we give every guest. Eat on a terrace overlooking the square first, so you can see its shape and rhythm from above. Then walk down into it. Doing it the other way round is how people end up overwhelmed rather than delighted.

Majorelle Garden

Created by the French painter Jacques Majorelle from the 1920s and later restored by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, the Jardin Majorelle is two and a half acres of bamboo, cactus and water features built around a cobalt blue villa. The Yves Saint Laurent Museum sits next door and the Berber Museum is inside the garden itself.

It is popular and it feels it. Book tickets in advance for a slot before ten in the morning, or accept a queue. It is the best antidote in Marrakech to a heavy morning in the souks, which is exactly how we schedule it.

The souks

The souks north of Jemaa el Fna are organised loosely by trade: leather in one quarter, metalwork in another, then dyers, carpets, slippers and spices. Bargaining is normal and friendly. A reasonable approach is to start around forty percent of the opening price and settle near the middle, and to remember that if you are happy at the final figure, it is a fair price regardless of what anyone else paid.

Beyond the square: the Bahia Palace with its painted cedar ceilings, the Saadian Tombs, the ruins of El Badi, the Koutoubia minaret that orients the whole medina, and the Ben Youssef Medersa, which is the most beautiful interior in the city. A full guided day covers the palaces and the souks; a second day lets you add the garden, a hammam, or a day trip to the Ourika Valley or the Agafay stone desert.