Historic "7th Art" Café in Rabat Faces Demolition, Manager to Appeal

After the closure of the café, the Rabat authorities decided to raze the site. The demolition decision, notified to its manager since November 19 last, orders him to vacate the premises within forty-eight hours, reports the weekly Al Watan cited by Le360. The latter contested this decision of the city council, stressing that it did not take into account the social conditions of the families of the employees who have been working there since 1997.

In 2011, the café manager had received a formal notice from the city council asking him to vacate the premises in order to allow it to launch the construction work of the town hall headquarters. He had also contested this decision. As the matter did not follow up, he continued his development work on the site and continued to regularly pay the rental fees to the town hall.

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The tenants, bosses and employees of the site had been verbally informed, at the beginning of the health crisis, of the decision to close it. But it was only last Monday that the authorities notified the manager of the decision to demolish part of the space within forty-eight hours. According to Al Watan, this decision is part of the city’s development plan, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012. "The common areas should be recovered and restored to their original state before launching the procedure for registering the site in the National Register of Historic Places," the authorities explain.

"The site plans had never been modified since the signing of the lease between the foundation of the social works of the Moroccan Film Center and the urban commune of Rabat," contests the manager, Fouad El Kamani, assuring that justice had already ruled on this issue in November 2013.