Royal Palace

This guide to Casablanca's Royal Palace opens with a question: why did it take Morocco's king two years to trust anyone with the keys to his palaces again after the 1971 coup attempt at Skhirat killed his longtime decorator? It follows French decorator Andre Paccard, who finally took the job in 1973, and the maalems, the master craftsmen who had already worked inside these same walls under the king's father, cutting zellige tile and carving plaster by hand. The palace behind these gates was built decades earlier, in the 1920s, by the Pertuzio brothers, in the Habous quarter you're standing in now.