Algeria

Algiers (the capital of Algeria — the largest country in Africa at 2.38 million km², 46 million people) with the Casbah of Algiers (UNESCO World Heritage — a 16th-century Ottoman fortress-town of labyrinthine alleys, Turkish houses with elaborate tilework, hammams and mosques on the hillside above the bay — home to 50,000 people in a medieval urban fabric unchanged since the 17th century) and the Notre-Dame d’Afrique church.

💡 The Casbah of Algiers (a UNESCO-listed historic urban district built by the Ottoman Beys who ruled Algeria from 1518 to 1830) is one of the densest surviving medieval Islamic urban environments in the world — the same alleys, courtyards and street pattern that housed the corsair pirates of the Barbary Coast in the 17th century are still inhabited today. The Battle of Algiers (1957 — the urban guerrilla campaign by the FLN against French colonial occupation, depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film) was fought street by street in these same alleys.

Tipaza (UNESCO World Heritage — a large Roman city on the Mediterranean coast 70km west of Algiers, with the ruins of the basilica, theatre, amphitheatre and necropolises of a prosperous Roman provincial capital dating from the 1st to 5th century AD, set directly on the clifftop above the sea — the most dramatically sited Roman ruins in North Africa) and the mausoleum of Tin Hinan (the legendary ancestress of the Tuareg).

💡 Albert Camus grew up in Algeria (in the working-class suburb of Belcourt in Algiers) and visited Tipaza throughout his life; his essay “Noces à Tipasa” (1938) described the ruins in terms of sensory intoxication: “In the spring, Tipaza is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthium leaves, in the silver armour of the sea, in the raw blue sky, in the flower-covered ruins, and in the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone.” The essay made Tipaza famous in literary circles.

Timgad (UNESCO World Heritage — a complete Roman colonial city in the Aurès Mountains 500km east of Algiers, founded by Emperor Trajan in 100 AD and abandoned after the Vandal and Arab conquests, preserved under desert sand for 1,300 years and excavated from 1881 — the most complete Roman grid-plan city visible anywhere, with the forum, cardo, theatre, triumphal arch and street plan entirely legible, the finest example of Roman urban planning in Africa).

💡 Timgad (Thamugadi in Latin) was founded by Emperor Trajan in 100 AD as a military colony for veterans of the 3rd Augustan Legion. It was built in a single campaign to a standard Roman grid plan — 11 blocks east-west by 11 blocks north-south, with the forum, basilica, cardo and decumanus exactly as prescribed in the Roman military engineering manual. The city was abandoned after the Arab conquest of the 7th century; the desert sand that buried it preserved the street level intact for 1,200 years.

Djemila (UNESCO World Heritage — a Roman city of 30,000 people at 900m altitude in the Kábylie mountains, the finest example of Roman adaptation to mountain terrain — the temple of Septimius Severus, the Christian basilicas of the late Roman period and the triumphal arch of Caracalla, surrounded by the original city grid on a mountain ridge 350km east of Algiers, the museum on site containing the finest Roman mosaics in North Africa).

💡 Djemila (Roman Cuicul — founded approximately 98 AD under Emperor Nerva) was one of the most prosperous cities in the province of Numidia at its height in the 2nd–3rd century, with 30,000 inhabitants on a mountain ridge at 900m. The combination of altitude (keeping temperatures moderate), the completeness of the ruins and the museum’s extraordinary mosaic collection (the largest collection of Roman mosaics in situ in North Africa) makes Djemila the most artistically rewarding Roman site in Algeria.

The Mzab Valley (UNESCO World Heritage — a 10th-century Islamic city-state founded by the Ibadi Muslim sect in the northern Sahara, five ksour (fortified villages) built on rock outcrops above palm groves in an arid canyon — Ghardaïa, Melika, Beni Isguen, El Atteuf and Bou Noura — the finest surviving example of Saharan fortified city architecture and the source of Le Corbusier’s North African architectural inspiration).

💡 Le Corbusier visited Ghardaïa in 1931 and the city profoundly influenced his architectural thinking — the pure geometric forms, the white cubic houses, the separation of pedestrian and vehicle traffic and the climate-responsive architecture (thick walls, narrow shaded streets, courtyard houses with central wells) all appeared in his subsequent Modernist designs. He described the Mzab as “an immutable lesson in clarity, wisdom and living in harmony.”

1h30 flight. Tamanrasset — the main city of the Algerian Sahara (1,100km south of Algiers, 1,400m altitude, population 120,000 — the capital of the Tuareg region and the gateway to the Ahaggar Mountains — the most spectacular mountain massif in the central Sahara, a moonscape of ancient granite peaks rising to 2,918m, home to the largest remaining Tuareg community in Africa and the highest concentration of prehistoric rock art in the Sahara).

💡 The Tuareg people (the Kel Tamasheq — the indigenous Berber nomadic people of the central and western Sahara, population approximately 2 million spread across Algeria, Mali, Niger, Libya and Burkina Faso) have inhabited the Sahara for 5,000+ years. The Tuareg warrior aristocracy dominated trans-Saharan trade routes for 2,000 years; their distinctive indigo-dyed robes (which stain the skin, giving them the name “Blue People”) and their matrilineal social structure are unique in the Berber world.

The Ahaggar National Park (450,000km² — the largest national park in the world, a protected wilderness of volcanic rock formations, sand seas and the highest peaks in the Algerian Sahara — with the Assekrem plateau (2,728m — the finest sunrise viewpoint in the Sahara, where Charles de Foucauld built a hermitage in 1904 and lived until his murder in 1916 by Tuareg raiders — now a pilgrimage site for French Catholics)). Fly from Algiers (ALG) or Tamanrasset (TMR).

💡 Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916 — a French Catholic monk who converted from aristocratic soldier to ascetic mystic, built a hermitage at Assekrem in the Ahaggar at 2,728m, lived alone among the Tuareg for 12 years trying to learn Tuareg language and culture, and was killed by a Tuareg raiding party in 1916 at Tamanrasset) was beatified by Pope Francis in 2022, making him the most recently beatified martyr in North Africa.