Back to Casa

One of the advantages of the LH 4118 flight from Frankfurt to Casablanca is its very late arrival, pas midnight. At that time, you go very quickly through the controls, policemen and Immigration and Customs officers are obviously also longing to go to bed. Just after that, you’re on a Moroccan motorway, where it is perfectly normal for a speeded Mercedes to try to create a third lane just by passing between a truck and a bus. A few horn-blows, and that’s all, no accident and no reaction from the nearby police car.
Casablanca by night is quite surprising, totally emptied of its daily animation, silent, nearly clean, the main avenues seem too large, when, in the day, they are crowded by four or five lanes unable to go over 5 km / hour.
In this darkness, the luminous colomn of the minaret of Hassan II mosque is even more visible, signalling the direction of the sea. From the balcony of our hotel room, I have the feeling I’m very near it.

This year, the mosque is in maintenance. At least the pillars that sustain the part built over the sea. It was a nice case of several dozen million euros, a nice Moroccan story, complicated enough, between Bouygues (the French entrepreneur that built the mosque) and Morocco. So, nearly two thirds of the mosque have been built over the sea, on concrete pillars anchored in the rock. These pillars are “fissures” threatening the stability of the whole building. Bouygues argues of the technical difficulties, such a construction was a “premiere”, the strength of the waves was bigger than expected, and anyway the damages are happening more than twenty years after the official reception, so it’s to Morocco to pay the repairs.
Well… it happens that the official technical reception was never signed ! The mosque is used for more than twenty years, but that was never official. And it is still under guarantee argues Moroccan state, asking Bouygues to pay.

Whatever they decided, they have reached a compromise, and some cranes are at work in front of the mosque. That’s good news, and I hope the way around the mosque, on the seaside, will soon be opened again.

This building is magnificent. The mosque itself is splendid, more for its traditional decorations, the marbled prayer rooms, its sculpted ceilings, the washing rooms with marble fountains shaped as lotus flowers, than for the technical performance of the huge roof that can slide completely opened. More than anything, the situation is unique, on a huge place, directly at the sea. In all this blue of the large cloudless sky and the strong waves, the mosque becomes like a white ship with green sails.