Exploring Historical Remnants -

If you’re planning a trip to Morocco, make sure to include a visit to its capital city, Rabat. Rabat is home to several important monuments that are worth exploring. One of the most iconic landmarks in Rabat is the Hassan Tower. Hassan Tower in Berber languages: ⵙⵓⵎⵓⵄⵜ ⵏ ⵃⴰⵙⵏis the minaret of a mosque that was intended to be the largest in the world. Its construction in 1195, but was never completed. Caliph Yacoub el-Mansour started construction of the mosque in 1196, but he died 3 years later, and the mosque was never finished. Hassan Tower was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012 as part of Rabat, Modern Capital and Historic City a Shared Heritage.

The tower stands at approximately 44 meters (144 feet) in height, with a square base of around 20 meters (66 feet) on each side. The planned mosque, intended to be an architectural masterpiece, was envisioned to rival the grandeur of the Almohad Mosque in Marrakech.

Today, the Hassan Tower and its adjacent Mausoleum of Mohammed V are important cultural and historical sites in Rabat, drawing visitors from around the world. The tower is surrounded by the remnants of columns and walls, offering a glimpse into the grandeur that was originally intended for the site.

Yaqub al-Mansur

Founder of the Hassan Tower, Yaqub al-Mansur, is the third Caliph of Almohad Caliphate. Almohad dynasty, a Berber empire in West Africa and Iberia. The tower, according to tradition, was designed by an architect named Jabir who used a similar design plan for Hassan’s sister tower, the Giralda in Seville, modern day Spain. Both of the towers were modeled on the minaret of another one of Jabir’s designs, the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh. Renaissance Spaniards later added a western style top to the Giralda, which was converted from a minaret to a bell tower for the Seville Cathedral after the Reconquista.

The tower is made of sandstone[14] which has progressively turned a red ochre colour over the centuries.[5] It has a square floor plan like other minarets in the region, measuring 16 meters per side.[3] The current structure is 44 m (144 ft) tall but its intended height – based on knowledge of the regular proportions of other Almohad minarets – was at least 64 m (210 ft), possibly 80 m (260 ft) to the top of its second tier (the smaller lantern tower usually topping minarets) and finial.[3][5] This would have made it slightly taller than the original Giralda in Seville.[3] Instead of stairs, the tower is ascended by ramps, which would have allowed the muezzin to ride a horse to the top to issue the call to prayer.[2] At the center of each of the six floors would have been a vaulted chamber surrounded by the ramps and lit by the horseshoe-shaped windows set into the sides of the tower.[10][9] Its exterior is decorated with panels of sebka patterning as well as engaged columns and capitals carved from the same sandstone as the tower itself, although today it also retains one marble capital of Andalusi