How did Casablanca get its name?

The most famous city in Morocco is named, in two languages at once, "the white house." Nobody is entirely sure which house it was.

The site had an older name. Berber speakers called the city Anfa, which Wikipedia's history of Casablanca says means "hill." In 1468 Portugal's King Afonso V captured and destroyed it. Britannica says Anfa was a Berber village by the 12th century, though it calls the town's origin unknown. It confirms the destruction and adds that the Portuguese returned in 1515 and built a new town they called Casa Branca, "White House."

The Portuguese used the ruins to build a military fortress, and the village that grew around it took the name. Neither Wikipedia nor Britannica says what the white house was. They give only the literal meaning. A whitewashed building or tower is the obvious guess, but those sources do not state it.

The Portuguese did not last. An earthquake in 1755 destroyed the city and the Portuguese abandoned it. Britannica's summary says a Moroccan sultan occupied the town in 1757, and its full article says he rebuilt it in the late 18th century and that Spanish merchants gave it the name Casablanca. Wikipedia places the sultan's rebuilding of the medina around 1770, with Spanish help, and says the town was then called Casa Blanca, the Spanish for white house.

The Arabic name came as a translation. According to Wikipedia, the sultan gave the name ad-Dar al-Bayda, a literal rendering of Casablanca, when he rebuilt the medina. Both forms mean the same thing: house, white.

In 1907 French forces took control of the city after French citizens were killed there, and they kept the Spanish-derived name. The city later hosted the 1943 Casablanca Conference of the Allied powers during World War II.

So the name has had a quiet history of being translated rather than replaced. Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic each rendered the same two words, and the French kept the Spanish form.