Casablanca

Where it sits. Casablanca spreads along the Atlantic coast of Morocco about 90 kilometres south-west of Rabat, on a low shelf of land with no natural harbour, which is why its port is one of the largest artificial ports in Africa. With well over three million people in the city and more than four million in the wider metropolitan area, it is the largest city in the Maghreb, the country's financial capital, home to the Casablanca Stock Exchange and to most of Morocco's industry. It is not a museum city, and travellers who arrive expecting a film set are usually disappointed for the first hour and then won over by something else entirely.

The story behind it. The settlement was called Anfa before the 15th century, a Berber port that the Portuguese sacked and later occupied, leaving the name Casa Branca, the white house, which Spanish traders turned into Casablanca. Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah rebuilt it after the earthquake of 1755. The city that exists now is essentially a French colonial creation: after the protectorate was imposed in 1912, Resident-General Lyautey and the planner Henri Prost laid out boulevards, roundabouts and a civic centre outside the old medina, and filled them through the 1920s and 1930s with an extraordinary body of Art Deco and Mauresque architecture, buildings that fuse French modernism with Moroccan zellij tilework, carved plaster and horseshoe arches. Much of it survives around Boulevard Mohammed V and the Place Mohammed V, often shabby, occasionally magnificent. In January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Anfa Hotel above the city for the Casablanca Conference, at which the Allies committed to unconditional surrender.

On screen. The 1942 film that made the name famous was shot entirely on sound stages in Burbank, California, and no member of its cast set foot here. Casablanca's real cinema credit is more recent: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) filmed in Morocco from late August into late September 2014, with the unit working in Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakesh and Agadir. Tom Cruise arrived in Rabat on 30 August 2014, and the Moroccan act of the film, the dive into the flooded vault, the car chase through tight coastal streets and the motorcycle pursuit down mountain switchbacks, is assembled from those locations. Casablanca has also drawn a steady flow of other productions to its port, its factories and its colonial-era streets, which double convincingly for several other cities. The Rick's Cafe on the edge of the old medina is a genuine 1930s courtyard house converted in 2004 by a former American diplomat as a deliberate tribute to a film that was never made here, and it is worth seeing as a piece of tourism history rather than as a location.

What you actually see. The Hassan II Mosque is the reason most visitors come. Completed in 1993 to designs by Michel Pinseau, it stands partly over the Atlantic on a promontory of reclaimed rock, holds 25,000 worshippers inside and 80,000 on its esplanade, has a retractable roof and a heated marble floor, and carries a minaret 210 metres tall, which held the record as the tallest in the world until the Djamaa el Djazair in Algiers overtook it. It is one of the few mosques in Morocco that non-Muslims may enter, on guided tours at set times. Beyond it, the Quartier Habous, built in the 1930s as a planned new medina, is the most coherent piece of Franco-Moroccan urbanism in the country; the old medina behind the port is small and workaday; and the Corniche at Ain Diab runs west past beach clubs and seafood restaurants to the lighthouse at El Hank.

More of the built city. Two other buildings repay a detour. The former Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on the edge of the Parc de la Ligue Arabe, finished in 1930, is a white reinforced-concrete church with Gothic proportions and Moroccan geometry that has been deconsecrated since independence and now opens as an exhibition hall. The Villa des Arts, a 1934 Art Deco villa near the same park, houses a contemporary art foundation and is free to enter. Together with the Mahkama du Pacha, a 1950s courthouse of carved cedar and zellij in the Habous quarter, they show how thoroughly this city treated architecture as an argument.

Getting there and timing. Mohammed V International Airport is Morocco's main hub, 30 kilometres south-east, with a direct train to Casa Voyageurs station in about 40 minutes. The Al Boraq high-speed line reaches Tangier in just over two hours and Rabat in under an hour; a modern tram network covers the centre. October to April is the comfortable season, with mild days and Atlantic weather; the coastal fog known locally as the tayeb can sit over the city on summer mornings. Ramadan changes opening hours across the board, and Friday afternoons are quiet in the commercial districts.