Hassan II Mosque — mosque
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Hassan II Mosque

  • 1 min read
  • 33.607° N 7.633° W

Interesting facts

  • About twelve million Moroccans contributed to the building fund, each receiving a receipt and certificate, and the smallest recorded donation was just 5 dirhams.
  • A laser at the top of the 210-metre minaret shines toward Mecca at night and can be seen up to about 30 kilometres away.
  • The sliding roof of the prayer hall weighs about 1,100 tonnes yet opens in roughly five minutes, letting worshippers pray beneath the stars.
  • The minaret was the tallest in the world when completed in 1993, built with a Bouygues concrete about four times stronger than usual to resist wind and earthquakes.
  • Almost every material came from Morocco: cedar from the Middle Atlas, marble from Agadir and granite from Tafraoute, with Italian white granite columns and Murano glass chandeliers the main exceptions.
  • At the peak of construction about 1,400 men worked by day and 1,100 by night, yet the mosque still missed its 1989 target, the king's 60th birthday.
  • The prayer hall is said to be large enough to contain Notre-Dame de Paris, and its central nave rises about 40 metres.
  • The hammam in the basement is finished in tadelakt, a traditional Moroccan plaster worked with black soap and, here, egg yolk.
  • Barely ten years after opening, Atlantic salt water had corroded the steel inside the concrete, and a repair begun in 2005 replaced 100 wave-breaking pillars with stainless-steel-reinforced ones.
  • Waves can reach about 10 metres here, so two large breakwaters were built to shield the mosque, along with an 800-metre temporary pier during construction.

Why it is worth it

King Hassan II built this mosque on a foundation that should not really exist: reclaimed land driven into the Atlantic, with roughly half the structure extending out over open water. The idea traces to a specific line in the Quran describing God's throne as resting upon water, and Hassan II was explicit about his reasoning — worshippers on solid ground should be able to look out at sky and ocean at the same time. Committing to that idea forced real engineering problems. Salt air corrodes most metals, so the doors were made of titanium instead. The reclaimed marine foundation alone needed 300,000 cubic metres of concrete and 40,000 tonnes of steel just to hold stable ground under a building of this size.

French architect Michel Pinseau designed it, and the construction firm Bouygues built it in seven years, breaking ground in July 1986 and finishing for an inauguration on 30 August 1993 — a tight schedule for a project this scale, driven partly by the king's wish to see it completed in his lifetime. Some of the more theatrical details reinforce the water theme rather than just gesture at it: part of the hall stands on a platform over the Atlantic, and a retractable roof can slide open to the sky on significant occasions.

At 210 metres, the minaret was the tallest of any mosque in the world when it was completed in 1993, and the building as a whole can hold roughly 105,000 people between the interior hall and the surrounding esplanade — numbers that put it in the same conversation as the largest religious buildings anywhere, despite being barely three decades old.

Getting there

Located in Casablanca. Mohammed V International Airport (CMN) is about 27 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Morocco 21The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Morocco 6The Most Beautiful Modern Mosques 6The Most Beautiful Modern Sacred Places 10The Most Beautiful Mosques 61The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Hassan II Mosque is a mosque in Casablanca, Morocco. It is the second largest mosque in Africa and one of the largest mosques in the world. Its minaret is the world's second tallest minaret at 210 metres (689 ft). Completed in 1993, it was designed by Michel Pinseau under the guidance of King Hassan II and built by Moroccan artisans from all over the kingdom. The minaret is 60 stories high, topped by a laser, the light from which is directed towards Mecca. The mosque stands on a promontory looking out to the Atlantic Ocean; worshippers can pray over the sea but there is no glass floor looking into the sea. The walls are made of handcrafted marble, and the roof is retractable. A maximum of 105,000 worshippers can gather together for prayer: 25,000 inside the mosque hall and another 80,000 on the mosque's outside ground.

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