The Famous Tower in Rabat : see more here

The Hassan Tower is a famous tower in Rabat, Morocco's capital, constituting the minaret of a mosque unfinished twelfth century. It is the most famous landmark of the city and one of the most famous of Morocco.

The Sultan Yacoub El Mansour of the Almohad dynasty planned to build the largest mosque in the Muslim world after Samarra in Iraq.

It is not known much of this gigantic work beginning with the name which is unknown origin: the place name, name of a tribe or name of the supervisor. Some historians of the eighteenth century, including Spanish, the architect is a man named Jabir ibn Aflah, Latinized the sixteenth century under the name of Gever, Sevillian died around the year 1197 that would have created identically the Giralda in Seville, Marrakech Koutoubia and the minaret of the Hassan mosque in Rabat.

This hypothesis has never been confirmed. For most historians, the architect Ahmad Ben Baso, designer of the Koutoubia Mosque and the Giralda in Seville, under the same model, is also the architect of the Hassan Tower. One hypothesis holds the third most logical cooperation of several architects of which the most prominent are Ahmad Ben Baso and Jabir ibn Aflah. The only historical certainty, it is the date of commencement of work, and in 1196 the name of the sponsor. 

The works were abandoned after the death of Sultan Yacoub El Mansour in 1199. The minaret was to peak at more than 60 m, but only reached 44.3 m. The Hassan mosque was therefore improperly called Hassan Tower. The colonnade of the building was damaged by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.  

La Tour Hassan is built with a stone of red color in the characteristic style of palaces and religious buildings in Morocco. Inside, not the typical stairs minarets but ramps allowing the muezzin to reach the summit on horseback to the call to prayer.

With its four facades carved in stone, each with a different ornamentation, the Hassan Tower closely resembles the minaret of the Koutoubia, Marrakech, or the Giralda in Seville, Spain.

Near the minaret one can discover the remains of the unfinished mosque with its walls in ruins and nearly 200 columns that were to support the roof of the building. These columns were almost all destroyed during the 1755 earthquake.