Historic Rabat Café Demolished for Courthouse Rehabilitation Project

13 December 2021 – bySylvanus@Bladi · 1 min read

Workers have started demolishing the "7th Art" café, located on Avenue Allal Ben Abdellah, in the center of Rabat. A demolition decided by the city authorities, but which arouses anger among the people of Rabat.

In Rabat, the demolition work of the "7th Art" café located on a plot of land belonging to Bank Al-Maghrib (BAM) was launched on Sunday, reports Hespress. According to a poster at the entrance of the café, the infrastructure being demolished will make way for a rehabilitation project of the historic site of the first courthouse of the capital.

The Rabat authorities had in the meantime ordered the closure of this café, before deciding on its destruction. This decision had been notified to the manager of the space on November 19 last. He had been ordered to vacate the premises within forty-eight hours.

This decision is part of the city’s development plan, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012, reported the weekly Al Watan. "The common spaces 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 explained.