Rabat might be the most “boring” city in Africa, but I think that’s a good thing.
Rabat is safe and clean. You will see workers collecting trash if you’re out early in the morning. Even the tiny winding alleys in the Medina are mostly free of trash and feces, despite all of the stray animals. This something that few other cities outside of the developed world have managed to replicate. It is cleaner than San Francisco!
The market streets in the medina are beautiful and bustling but there are a disappointing number of shops selling mass manufactured global brands or knockoffs thereof.
The tourism industry is entrepreneurial but not pushy. While eating lunch in a plaza along the mouth of the Bouregreg river an entire fleet of plastic go-kart rentals materialized to fill a demand which, while invisible to me, quickly revealed itself. Soon multiple crews of teenagers were pulling up in large vans filled with diversely themed vehicles which they rented out to what seemed like mostly domestic tourists.
The restaurants in the medina riads have wonderful atmospheres but are expensive. The food gets better as you get further from the medina walls and the other heavily touristed parts of the city. Service is universally slow.
Most of the barber shops I saw also offered blood-cupping.
January seems like the right time of year to go. The weather is perfect once you get walking and there aren’t yet many other tourists or surfers.
Rabat is safe, clean, unjudgmental, and has several interesting places to be.
I happened to be in Rabat recently as well - it was indeed very clean by Moroccan standards. But not that interesting or inspiring relative to Marrakesh or Casablanca IMO.
https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1731985464293269746
I particularly look askance at how they filled the entire seafront with cemeteries.