Notre-Dame de Lourdes Casablanca

Notre-Dame de Lourdes was built between 1953 and 1956 to a design by Achille Dangleterre and Édouard Delaporte, and from outside it is unpromising - a plain concrete box with a low profile and a detached tower. Inside is the reason to go: the walls are not really walls but frames holding around eight hundred square metres of stained glass by Gabriel Loire of Chartres, in a technique using thick slabs of coloured glass set in concrete rather than lead, so the colour is dense and the light in the nave is deep blue and red rather than pale. The scheme runs the length of the building and includes a large composition of the Virgin. It is a working parish church with a congregation now largely from sub-Saharan Africa, as at the Rabat cathedral. It is little visited and is one of the better twentieth-century interiors in Morocco.

What you actually see

• Eight hundred square metres of glass - the walls effectively made of it.
• Slab glass in concrete - dense colour and deep light rather than pale leaded work.
• A plain exterior - a concrete box that gives no indication of the interior.
• A working parish - a congregation now largely from West and Central Africa.

When to go

October to April; midday and afternoon for the strongest light. Half an hour.

Honest expectations

It is a working church and services take precedence. Opening outside service hours is not guaranteed. The exterior is genuinely unremarkable. The surrounding roundabout is busy with traffic.

Nearby

Mohammed V square is north-east; the Habous quarter is south.