Quartier Habous

This guide to Quartier Habous in Casablanca starts at a nearly century-old pastry shop on Rue Ibn Khaldoun, still paying rent to a landlord who can never die or sell the land beneath it. It traces that landlord back to 1916, when a wealthy trader named Haim Bendahan tried to give the sultan a stretch of open land, and to the unusual legal move that followed. French architect Albert Laprade and his colleagues then spent a decade, from 1917 to 1926, laying out the arcaded streets and covered souks around you.