Walking Tours of Casablanca-Settat
Four routes cover almost everything worth walking to in Casablanca-Settat, and only one of them is actually inside Casablanca’s old medina.
Downtown: the Art Deco and Mauresque circuit
Starting at Place Mohammed V and following Boulevard Mohammed V, Rue Idriss Lahrizi and Boulevard de Paris, this roughly 2.5-hour route covers the densest concentration of 1920s and 1930s Art Deco and Mauresque facades in the city, stained glass and grand cinema palaces like the Cinema Rialto included. Casamémoire , the local heritage NGO, publishes architectural maps of this exact stretch, useful if the building names matter as much as the facades themselves. A search for Casablanca walking tours turns up guided versions of this same route if a local architectural historian adds more than a self-guided map can.
The Habous Quarter, at a slower pace than the downtown grid
The Habous Quarter, planned in the 1920s as a “New Medina,” rewards wandering without a fixed route: covered arcades, bookshops, pastry stalls at Pâtisserie Bennis, and courtyards that don’t announce themselves from the street. It’s calmer and less commercially aggressive than a traditional medina, which makes it one of the few walks on this list that works just as well without any plan at all. An hour is enough to see most of it, though it’s easy to lose that hour to a slow coffee at one of the arcade’s shaded benches instead.
El Jadida’s citadel walk, a genuinely different kind of route
About 100 kilometers southwest, El Jadida’s walled 16th-century Portuguese old town supports a perimeter walk along the sea ramparts, down the main Rue de Carreira, into the Gothic-vaulted Portuguese Cistern, and out through the old sea gate, the Porte de la Mer. This is stone fortification and Atlantic coastline rather than downtown streets, distinct enough from the Casablanca routes that it shouldn’t be mentally filed under the same city at all. A shore excursion walking El Jadida and neighboring Azemmour covers this exact ramparts route with a guide, and the fortress carries UNESCO World Heritage status as the Portuguese City of Mazagan.
Marché Central and the Old Medina fringe
Casablanca’s own Old Medina is small and workaday compared to Fes or Marrakech, more a functioning neighborhood than a tourist circuit, and the more rewarding walk here runs through the 1917 French-designed Marché Central, past flower vendors and into the edge of the medina’s street souqs. Keep bags zipped and phones out of back pockets in the more crowded market alleys; it’s ordinary city-center caution rather than a specific warning about this particular medina, which is generally low-key by comparison with bigger, more tourist-dense old towns elsewhere in the country.
Timing these four against each other
The downtown circuit and the Habous walk both fit into a single Casablanca day without rushing either one. El Jadida is its own separate day, not an add-on to the city routes, given the travel time each way. The Marché Central walk pairs naturally with either downtown route since it sits close enough to Place Mohammed V to fold into the same morning.
Verdict: do downtown and Habous back to back on a Casablanca day, and give El Jadida’s citadel walk its own full day rather than compressing it alongside anything else. For the museums and interior sights that sit along these same routes, see the attraction tours guide .
Wear shoes that handle both cobblestone and sand comfortably; the El Jadida route moves from stone ramparts to a sandy sea gate approach within the same short walk, and the wrong footwear turns the last stretch into a slower slog than it needs to be.