Algiers is one of the most photogenic and least visited capitals in the Mediterranean: a white city climbing like an amphitheatre above a blue bay, with the Ottoman medina of the Casbah tumbling down to the port, the boulevards and wrought-iron balconies of French colonial Algiers, and a modern skyline topped by the towering minaret of the new Great Mosque. For decades it was almost off the tourist map; today it's opening up again to curious travellers.
The city holds three thousand years of Mediterranean history: it was Roman Icosium, the heart of an Ottoman regency feared for its corsairs, the 'pearl' of French Algeria and, above all, the setting for one of the most intense anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century, the War of Independence and the famous Battle of Algiers. You can feel all of it walking through its neighbourhoods, from the maze of the Casbah to the wide seafront promenades.
This guide covers Algiers from a practical angle: what to see in the medina and the colonial city, how to visit the Basilica of Notre-Dame d'Afrique and the Martyrs' Memorial, where to eat, how to get around and how to use the capital as a base for day trips to Tipasa. Algiers rewards patient travellers with an authenticity that's hard to find in the Mediterranean these days.
Born as the modest Roman town of Icosium, Algiers took its current shape when the Berber Buluggin ibn Ziri refounded it in 944. In the 16th century it became the capital of a powerful Ottoman regency, the base of the 'Barbary' corsairs who spread terror across the Mediterranean for three centuries. In 1830 France occupied it and turned it into the showcase of its colonial empire in Africa, until the long and bloody War of Independence (1954-1962) — with the legendary Battle of Algiers fought in the alleys of the Casbah — ended in Algeria's independence in 1962. The full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The “white” capital, rising like an amphitheatre above the Mediterranean from a 10th-century Zirid town, heart of the corsair Regency and of Algerian resistance, with its World Heritage Casbah and the Roman Tipasa that captivated Camus.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Algiers existed, this stretch of coast was home to a modest Phoenician settlement and later a small Roman port called Icosium, part of the province of Mauretania Caesariensis. It was never a great city: a handful of houses, a forum, some baths and a necropolis on the hillside. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the Vandal and Byzantine invasions, the settlement was reduced to little more than ruins by the sea.
The Algiers we know was born in 944, when the Berber prince Buluggin ibn Ziri, of the Zirid dynasty, refounded the city on the ruins of Icosium. He named it Djazā'ir Banī Mazghanna, 'the islands of the Banu Mazghanna', after the rocky islets that lay off the bay (now joined to the port). From that name — al-Jazā'ir, 'the islands' — come both Algiers (the city) and Algeria (the whole country, which took its name from the capital).
In the Middle Ages, Algiers was a minor town in the shadow of more powerful cities such as Tlemcen, Béjaïa and Kairouan. It passed through Almoravid, Almohad, Zayyanid and Hafsid hands, and lived off maritime trade and fishing. Nothing suggested that this small port town would become, in the 16th century, one of the most feared powers in the Mediterranean.
The big turning point came in the early 16th century. Threatened by Spain, which had taken several North African ports after the conquest of Granada, the people of Algiers asked two corsair brothers of Greek-Ottoman origin for help: Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa. Around 1516-1529, Hayreddin drove the Spanish out of the fortified islet that controlled the port and placed the city under the protection of the Ottoman sultan. Algiers thus became the capital of a regency (the 'Regency of Algiers'), in theory part of the Ottoman Empire but in practice almost independent.
For the next three centuries, Algiers was the great stronghold of the 'Barbary' corsairs. Their fleets raided ships and coasts all over Europe, from Spain and Italy to the British Isles and even Iceland, seizing loot and above all Christian slaves, who were ransomed or sold in the city's market. Tens of thousands of Europeans are estimated to have passed through the 'bagnios' (prisons) of Algiers. One of the most famous captives was the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, held here for five years (1575-1580). He tried to escape several times before being ransomed, and the experience left its mark on his work.
Ruled by deys (the leaders of the Ottoman militia), Algiers grew rich on privateering and trade, and filled up with mosques, palaces and whitewashed houses. The steep, maze-like upper town we now call the Casbah took shape in this period. The major European powers, and even the young United States, ended up paying tribute to the deys to protect their trade, in what became known as the 'Barbary Wars'. It was both the golden age and the twilight of corsair Algiers.
The excuse for the end came as an almost trivial incident. In 1827, during a dispute over a debt, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul with a fan (or fly whisk). France used this 'insult' to blockade the city and, in 1830, landed an army. On 5 July 1830 Algiers surrendered and the dey went into exile. Three centuries of Ottoman regency were over, and the long, traumatic French colonisation began.
Unlike other colonies, Algeria was annexed as an integral part of France and settled by hundreds of thousands of European colonists, the 'pieds-noirs'. Many of them were Spanish, Italian and Maltese. Algiers became the showcase of the empire: parts of the lower town were demolished to open wide arcaded boulevards facing the port, and monumental buildings such as the Grande Poste went up, along with theatres, hotels and villas. The city filled with wrought-iron balconies and white façades. Colonial 'Alger la Blanche', elegant and European, was born.
But that splendour had a brutal flip side. The Muslim majority was stripped of its land, pushed to the political margins and subjected to a system of discrimination. Wealth and rights belonged to the European minority, while the local population lived as second-class citizens in their own country. More than a century of built-up injustice paved the way for the most important war in Algeria's modern history.
On 1 November 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched the uprising that started the Algerian War of Independence, one of the harshest anti-colonial conflicts of the 20th century. Algiers, and above all its Casbah, was one of the main stages. The famous Battle of Algiers was fought between 1956 and 1957. The FLN organised bombings and a general strike from the alleys of the medina, and the French army answered with fierce repression, systematically using torture and mass detention to break up the resistance's urban network.
Those months were burned into the world's memory by the film 'La battaglia di Algeri' (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) by the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. It was shot in the very same streets and is now a classic of political cinema. Figures such as Ali la Pointe and Yacef Saâdi became symbols of the struggle. Militarily, France 'won' the urban battle, but the moral and political cost was huge: the brutality of the repression made the colonial cause impossible to defend in the eyes of the world and of French society itself.
The war, atrocious across the whole country, dragged on until 1962 and left hundreds of thousands dead. The Évian Accords and a referendum opened the way to independence. On 5 July 1962, a symbolic date because it was the anniversary of the 1830 surrender, Algeria became a sovereign country with Algiers as its capital. Hundreds of thousands of pieds-noirs then left for France. A new nation was beginning its history.
For decades, independent Algiers was the showcase for the new Algeria's project: a one-party state (the FLN), with a socialist economy funded by oil and gas from the Sahara, and Third World rhetoric. The city filled with symbols of that era, such as the imposing Martyrs' Memorial (Maqam Echahid), opened in 1982 on the heights above the city to honour those who died for independence. Algiers grew fast, and its population multiplied as people arrived from the interior.
The 1990s brought the 'black decade'. After elections that the FIS was set to win were cancelled, a civil war broke out between the state and armed Islamist groups. It left some 150,000 to 200,000 dead and hit the capital hard with bombings and violence. Algiers, like the rest of the country, was scarred by that trauma. Things returned to normal in the early 2000s, and the city slowly went back to everyday life and began opening up to the outside world again.
In the 21st century Algiers has modernised. It opened a metro line in 2011 and has added trams, cable cars and major public works. In 2019 it opened the colossal Great Mosque of Algiers, with the tallest minaret in the world. Also in 2019, the peaceful 'Hirak' protest movement filled its streets and avenues with demonstrations that brought about the departure of President Bouteflika after twenty years in power. Today the capital combines the weight of its history (Roman, Ottoman, colonial, revolutionary) with the energy of a large Mediterranean city that is slowly turning its gaze back towards tourism and the wider world.
