Rabat lies on Morocco’s Atlantic coast at the mouth of the Bou Regreg, facing Salé across the river. Its historic quarters combine whitewashed and ochre houses, narrow lanes, courtyards and the blue-and-white streets of the Kasbah des Oudayas with the more spacious avenues and restrained architecture of the twentieth-century Ville Nouvelle. Among its most striking buildings are the unfinished Hassan Tower and the nearby Mausoleum of Mohammed V, the Kasbah and its monumental Bab Oudaia gate, the Almohad walls and the ruins of Chellah. The surrounding region is relatively fertile, with cereals, market gardening, citrus, olives and other crops, while the Bou Regreg valley provides an important agricultural landscape. What makes Rabat particularly distinctive is the way its medieval Islamic city has been incorporated into a carefully planned modern capital: historic monuments, traditional neighbourhoods, gardens and early twentieth-century European-influenced architecture form an unusually coherent urban landscape.