Heading to the east of Casablanca and the districts along the road to Rabat!

At the beginning of the 20th century, the districts of Roches Noires, Belvedère and Derb Sultan were onlya long landscape of wasteland and stones. No plot of land was suitable for agriculture at the time. The Roches Noires district was the first to develop, starting in the 1920s thanks to the energy deployed by the entrepreneur Eugène Lendrat. He is the one who drew up the first development plan for the Roches Noires beach, which initially included a lighthouse, a casino and a swimming pool. But Lendrat saw bigger things for his small triangular district along the coast, between the ocean and the Casa-Rabat railway line created in 1912: housing areas to the west but also industrial and commercial activities to the east.

Lendrat then supervised the development of this district, whose identity is strongly marked by the settlement of populations of Italian and Spanish origin. Casablanca was then home to the majority of Italian nationals in Morocco, who numbered around 25,000 until the early 1970s. The charismatic Eugène Lendrat, who was one of the very first to settle there with his family, then launched the construction of a series of public facilities: schools, markets, cinemas. He even had a neo-Gothic church built, the Sainte-Marguerite des Roches Noires church in 1929. A little later, in 1935, an Italian school was built to educate young Italians from Roches Noires, following a request from the Casablanca consulate.

The neighborhood is seeing the proliferation of small houses that generally accommodate modest families. The neighborhood is also seeing the construction of a workers' city signed by the great architect Edmond Brion, commissioned by the Compagnie Sucrière Marocaine de Raffinage, future COSUMAR. From the 1950s, we gradually saw the pavilions replaced by small modern buildings that experimented with the use of new materials such as glass or steel, as was the case with the Ateliers Vincent Timsit.

With the installation of large companies in Roches-Noires, on much larger plots of land than elsewhere in the city, the district confirms its industrial vocation. It expands towards the south and Derb Sultan, and beyond the railway line (today Hay Mohammadi). Let's go together to discover these districts of eastern Casablanca with CitizOn !