Casablanca Street Art & Murals — The Sbagha Bagha City

A decade ago few would have described Morocco's business capital as a street-art city. That changed as an urban-art festival began inviting artists to paint the tall blank gables of the city centre, using the sides of ordinary apartment blocks as canvases. Year on year the works accumulated, and the downtown now carries a scatter of large-scale murals that turn a walk through the Art Deco grid into a free open-air gallery. It is a different, more contemporary way to read a city better known for its commerce.

The scene is real but more dispersed than Rabat's saturated mural trail. Where the capital's festival splashed works across whole neighbourhoods, Casablanca's murals sit in pockets, biggest downtown and thinning out through the residential districts, so seeing them is as much about a relaxed wander as a fixed checklist. That suits the city: the murals share their streets with the world's densest concentration of 1930s Mauresque and Art Deco facades, and the two layers reward being explored together.

This guide follows the same city approach as our Rabat street art and murals guide and Marrakech street art and mural tour guide, mapping where the work is, how to walk it and how to photograph it. Treat any single list of walls as a snapshot, because street art is impermanent by nature and the map keeps changing.

The engine behind most of Casablanca's big walls is Sbagha Bagha, a street-art festival whose name plays on the Moroccan Arabic for painting. Running since the mid-2010s, it invites Moroccan and international muralists to transform the facades of residential buildings in the city centre each edition, working at height on scaffolding to cover several storeys at a time. The festival's focus on lived-in apartment blocks is what gives Casablanca's murals their particular character, dropped into everyday neighbourhoods rather than concentrated in an arts district.

Each edition adds a fresh batch of works, so the collection grows over time, though exact dates and line-ups shift year to year and are worth checking locally before you build a trip around the festival itself. The important point for most visitors is that the murals stay up long after the painting is done, so you do not need to time your visit to a festival to enjoy them. If your trip does coincide with an edition, you can watch artists at work on the scaffolding, which is a spectacle in itself.

Casablanca's scene sits alongside the city's broader creative energy, from its music festivals to its commercial galleries, part of a wider modern-city culture that our museums and galleries guide covers indoors. The murals are the most visible, and most democratic, face of that scene, free to everyone who walks the streets.

The greatest concentration is downtown, in and around the grid off Boulevard Mohammed V, where tall apartment gables gave the festival its first big canvases and where several major works sit within a few blocks of one another. This is also the heart of the Art Deco quarter, so you are photographing contemporary murals against a backdrop of 1930s facades, an unusually layered streetscape. From here the works thin out into the residential districts.

Beyond the centre, further murals are scattered through the Gauthier and Maarif neighbourhoods, the same districts that hold many of the city's private galleries, and occasional pieces turn up along the approaches to the old medina and elsewhere. Because the collection keeps growing and some works are eventually painted over, the exact map shifts, part of the living nature of street art, so half the pleasure is stumbling on pieces you did not expect.

Casablanca's murals span a wide stylistic range, reflecting the international line-ups the festival draws. You will find photorealist portraits several storeys high, bold geometric and optical abstraction, dreamlike surrealist scenes, and calligraffiti, the marriage of Arabic calligraphy with spray-can technique that turns script into sweeping abstract form and is one of the more recognisably Moroccan contributions to the global movement.

Thematically, many works engage with the city itself, with Moroccan identity, memory, womanhood, migration and the urban environment, alongside purely aesthetic and abstract pieces. Reading them slowly, noticing how an artist has worked with a building's windows, balconies and light, is part of the reward. It also gives Casablanca's contemporary art scene a public face to match the work hanging in the private galleries covered in our museums and galleries guide.

The best way to see the murals is a slow, self-guided wander rather than a rigid checklist. Start in the downtown around Boulevard Mohammed V, where several major works sit within a few blocks, then drift through the side streets and squares, letting the big gables pull you along and keeping your eyes up, as the largest pieces reveal themselves from a distance across junctions and open lots. Allow a couple of hours for the core.

From the centre, work outward toward Gauthier and Maarif if you want more, linking the murals with the gallery district and a cafe stop. The flat, walkable grid makes it easy, and cheap petit taxis, typically 10-30 MAD across the centre, bridge the longer gaps. Combine the walk with the city's Art Deco architecture for a fuller half-day, since the two share the same streets and light.

There is no ticket and no fixed route, which is the whole appeal. Because the collection is more dispersed than Rabat's, going in with the mindset of a relaxed exploration rather than a hunt for every wall will make for a better morning. Locals are often happy to point you toward the newest or their favourite piece if you ask.

Go by day for photography, when the light is best and the walls are safely visible; morning and late afternoon give the softest angles and least glare on the pale facades. A phone handles most murals well thanks to their scale, though a wider lens helps with the tallest gables where you cannot step far enough back. Because many works sit above busy junctions, watch the traffic when you move into the road for a wide shot.

A few courtesies go a long way. Many murals are painted on the sides of lived-in apartment blocks, so be considerate photographing people's homes and shopfronts, and ask before including residents or shopkeepers in a frame. The works were made to be seen, so respectful curiosity is welcomed, but treat the neighbourhoods as the everyday places they are rather than a set. Where you can identify an artist's signature or tag, crediting them when you share the image is good practice.

A mural morning pairs naturally with the rest of downtown Casablanca. The same central grid holds the city's Art Deco facades, the Marche Central and the squares, so you can fold the murals into a broader walking day that mixes the 1930s architecture with the contemporary walls. Add the private galleries in Gauthier and Maarif if you want to see the indoor side of the same scene, and a cafe or two to break the heat.

For contrast, the murals also connect Casablanca to the wider Moroccan street-art story. Our Rabat guide covers the capital's more saturated, festival-driven version of the same idea, while the Marrakech mural tour guide describes a smaller, gallery-led scene in the ville nouvelle. Between the three cities you can trace how quickly street art has found a home on Morocco's modern walls.