Mahkama du Pacha — Casablanca's Hidden Palace of Zellige

The Mahkama du Pacha is a mid-twentieth-century palace built to serve as the courthouse and official reception hall of the Pasha of Casablanca, completed around 1952. Despite its recent date, it was raised entirely in the traditional manner, by Moroccan master craftsmen using the same techniques that decorated the medieval medersas, and the result is one of the most lavishly finished interiors in the city, all the more surprising for hiding behind a plain exterior in the Habous quarter.

Inside, some sixty rooms and courtyards unfold in a Hispano-Moorish style: floors and walls sheathed in intricate zellige mosaic, ceilings of painted and carved cedar, walls of sculpted white stucco, marble columns, monumental brass doors and delicate wrought-iron screens. It was designed to impress visiting dignitaries and to dispense justice with ceremony, and parts of it still serve official functions today, which is exactly why getting in takes a little planning.

The palace is arranged around a sequence of reception halls and courtyards of increasing grandeur, and the pleasure is in the sheer density of craft. Look for the great reception rooms with their coffered cedar ceilings, the tiled courtyards with central fountains, and the walls where bands of zellige meet carved plaster inscriptions in a seamless Andalusian idiom. The scale is intimate rather than vast, so it is the fineness of the detail, not the size, that lingers.

Because it was a courthouse, some rooms were designed for judgement and audience, with the pasha's dais and ceremonial doorways, and a guardian can point out how the spaces were used. Photography is usually permitted, and the enclosed courtyards make the interiors well lit, but bring a wide lens for the ceilings. Compared with the older monuments elsewhere in Morocco, the Mahkama's appeal is seeing this level of traditional craftsmanship executed within living memory.

This is the part to get right, because the Mahkama is not a conventional museum and its opening is genuinely unpredictable. It remains an official building that hosts administrative functions and occasional ceremonies, so it opens to visitors only when it is not in official use, generally on weekday mornings and often into the early afternoon, and it is commonly closed at weekends and whenever an event is scheduled. There is no ticket office and no published, reliable timetable.

In practice, you turn up at the entrance on the Habous side and see whether a guardian will admit you; there is no fixed fee, but a tip of roughly 20 to 50 dirhams for the person who lets you in and shows you around is expected and fair. Because a wasted journey is a real possibility, do not build a tight schedule around it: fold it into a broader Habous visit, ask your riad or the local tourist office about current access first, and treat getting in as a bonus rather than a certainty.

The Mahkama sits in the heart of the Habous quarter, the 'new medina' the French built in the 1920s and 1930s in a clean, arcaded neo-Moorish style, and the quarter is a rewarding half-morning in its own right whether or not the palace is open. Its shaded colonnades shelter craft shops, olive and spice stalls, traditional clothing and, famously, some of the best pastry and biscuit shops in the city, along with a well-known cluster of Arabic and French booksellers.

A short walk away stands the Royal Palace of Casablanca, whose gates you can view from outside, and the Moulay Youssef Mosque, giving the compact quarter a genuine sense of ceremony. Because Habous is calm, orderly and easy to browse, it is the natural place to spend the time around a Mahkama visit; the shopping and food are mapped in the Casablanca Habous shopping guide, and the quarter's cafes in the Casablanca cafes and coffee guide.

What makes the Mahkama quietly astonishing is that it is not old, yet it was built as though it were. Everything you see was made by hand using the same guild crafts that decorated Morocco's medieval palaces and medersas, executed in the middle of the twentieth century by master artisans, many trained in the traditional workshops of Fes. The zellige alone, the geometric tile mosaic cut piece by piece from glazed tiles and set into interlocking stars and polygons, represents thousands of hours of a craft that had barely changed in six hundred years.

Alongside the tilework, look for the carved gebs, the white plaster sculpted into lacy arches, inscriptions and muqarnas; the zouaq, the painted and carved cedar of the ceilings and doors; and the tadelakt, the polished lime plaster that gives the walls their soft sheen. Seeing all of these techniques deployed together, and so recently, is a rare thing: it is a working demonstration that Morocco's decorative crafts were still fully alive in the 1950s, not a museum piece frozen in the distant past. That living continuity is arguably more moving than the age of the older monuments.

The Mahkama works best as one stop in a wider Casablanca itinerary rather than a destination in itself, precisely because you cannot count on it being open. A sensible plan visits the Habous quarter in the morning, tries the Mahkama while you are there, and continues to the city's fixed, dependable sights: the Art Deco downtown and the Ancienne Medina near the port, and the colossal Hassan II Mosque on the seafront, whose guided tours run to a set timetable you can actually book around.

That way, an open Mahkama is a delightful surprise and a closed one costs you nothing but a five-minute detour. The Art Deco quarter is covered in the Casablanca Art Deco architecture guide, the old town in the old medina walking guide, and the whole day comes together in the one day in Casablanca itinerary. Between them they make Habous and the Mahkama an easy addition to a classic city day.