Here's looking at you, Casablanca

I was desperate to fall madly in love with Casablanca. On my apartment wall I have a framed poster of the 1942 movie classic of the same name, which I've watched more times than is healthy. Who could grow weary of watching Bogart and Bergman's on-screen chemistry? How could you not admire their timeless sartorial panache? And will a writer ever be able to pack more memorable quotes into a screenplay?

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine," says Humphrey Bogart's Rick, owner of the eponymous bar. And when I knew I was going to Casablanca, I decided that I would walk into that same gin joint, where the piano would be playing, the air would be thick with Gitanes smoke and the bar would be propped up by louche men in tuxedos and trench coats.
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Casablanca, with its shortage of postcard-pretty landmarks, is usually a tourist's afterthought.
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And then came the bombshell.

Days before my flight, I found out that the film was shot on a cramped studio lot in the Hollywood Hills. As for Rick's bar, it never existed. At least not until 2004 when an enterprising Morocco-based American woman, who had obviously made the same disappointing discovery I did, decided to build one out of bricks rather than balsa wood, knowing it would be a bona fide tourist magnet. It was at this point that I realised I had romanticised the city of Casablanca to the point of absurdity.

Arriving late at night after a long flight from Dubai, I found the roads grid-locked, the pot-holed pavements crammed with people. Young, leather jacket-clad Moroccans socialising in and around the city's hundreds of cafés leaned nonchalantly against mopeds, smoking, laughing, eyeing up potential paramours in their brightly coloured hijabs across smog-filled streets.

Casablanca has a lively alfresco café culture. Certainly one to rival that of any city in Italy or France. By day, groups of men, young and old, chat idly. Or read the papers. Or just sit in a line with their backs to the café windows, watching the world go by. They sip espressos or traditional Moroccan tea (a combination of Ceylon leaves and mint) while getting their shoes shined by adolescent hands that should be holding a school pen not a dirty rag.

Poverty is never far away in Africa's 11th most populous city - old men sleeping in shop doorways at night are a common sight - and, like any big city in the developing world, it draws in the jobless from surrounding towns and villages only to chew them up and spit them back out on the street where they are forced to beg from the city's few tourists.

Casablanca, with its chronic shortage of postcard-pretty landmarks, is usually a tourist's afterthought. Atmospheric Marrakech and Fez invariably get the lion's share of visitors to Morocco. The statistics, however, could be in for a shake-up thanks to the recent opening of Morocco Mall, the country's first GCC-style mega mall, replete with luxury retailers, dancing fountains and a giant aquarium. While this is a major boost for the city, it's also sad that Morocco's first Starbucks in a sterile shopping centre could be the first step towards killing off its vibrant, decades-old street cafés.

Already, Casablanca's Berber history seems to have been all but buried beneath concrete and the peripheries of a sprawling port and naval base. Despite being in the heart of the Maghreb region, its streets are redolent of Paris - a forlorn, crumbling post-war Paris crying out for a good scrub and a battalion of painters to revive the art-deco buildings designed by French architect, Henri Prost, most of which can be found in the Ville Nouvelle (New Town) area of the city. The French influence - Morocco was a protectorate of France from 1912 until 1956 - is everywhere. Not just architecturally but linguistically, with half the Moroccan population able to speak French as well as Arabic and Berber.

Everywhere I went people approached me with a friendly ‘bonjour'. I replied with a mix of stuttering secondary-school French and one of the few Arabic phrases picked up in Dubai: "Je ne comprends pas. Titkallum Inglisi?"

On my second day in the city I set out for the Old Medina, an ancient but recently restored souq in the part of town pre-dating the French protectorate. In warren-like alleyways I found predictable tourist baubles (camel key rings and evil eye bracelets galore) alongside locally made leather products of superior quality and more lampshades than an Ikea factory. In a vast Aladdin's cave of clay pots, ornate cedar wood chests, hookah pipes and tasselled Fez hats, my search for a ‘Made in China' sticker proved satisfyingly fruitless.

Later I went on a bus tour to the old and affluent suburb of Anfa, Casablanca's original name before the marauding Portuguese arrived in the 15th century and re-named it Casa Branca, meaning ‘white house', after the military fortress they eventually built.