🇲🇦 Morocco
Casablanca
Casablanca (الدار البيضاء — Ad-Dār al-Bayḍāʾ, "The White House" in Arabic — population 3.75 million in the city, 5.1 million in the Grand Casablanca region — the economic capital of Morocco and the largest city in the Maghreb) is the city that the world knows from the Humphrey Bogart film but has little to do with it (the film (1942) was entirely shot in Hollywood: there is no "Rick's Café" in the real Casablanca — or rather there is now, a 2004 reconstruction built for tourists). The real Casablanca is the most modern, most industrialized and most economically powerful city in Morocco: the commercial and financial capital (70% of Morocco's industrial production is in the Grand Casablanca region), the largest port in Africa by container traffic, and the city that has the most remarkable modern architecture in the Maghreb: the Hassan II Mosque (1993 — the largest mosque in Africa and the 7th-largest in the world, built on a promontory extending over the Atlantic Ocean, with the world's tallest minaret (210m), the retractable roof and the glass floor through which the Atlantic is visible during prayers), the Art Deco downtown (the most concentrated collection of 1920s–1940s Art Deco architecture outside Miami — the Marché Central, the Villa des Arts and the entire grid of the Ville Nouvelle (New City) built by the French Protectorate), and the Quartier des Habous (the New Medina — the 1930s French colonial construction of a new medina in the traditional Moroccan style, built to house the rural migrants arriving in the industrial city).