Constantine is one of those cities you remember forever for its impossible setting: an old city perched on a great rock, almost surrounded by the chasm of the Rhumel river gorge, which cuts it off from the world like a natural moat more than a hundred metres deep. To connect its neighbourhoods with each other and with the outside, its inhabitants built a series of spectacular bridges over the course of history, which have given it its nickname: 'the city of bridges'.
But Constantine isn't just scenery: it's one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It was Cirta, the capital of the Berber kings of Numidia, and took its current name from the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who rebuilt it in the 4th century. Over the centuries it was Numidian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and French, and it keeps a medina, mosques, a dazzling Ottoman palace and a strong cultural identity as the cradle of Andalusian 'malouf' music.
This guide covers Constantine with a practical eye: how to walk its bridges and viewpoints without vertigo, what to see in the medina and the Palace of Ahmed Bey, how to use the cable car, where to eat and how to use it as a base for the Roman gems of the northeast, Djémila and Timgad. A dizzying city, literally, and one of the most memorable in Algeria.
Constantine was Cirta, the capital of the Berber kingdom of Numidia and of kings such as Masinissa, as far back as the 3rd century BC. Destroyed in the wars of the 4th century, it was rebuilt by the emperor Constantine the Great, who gave it his name. It then passed through Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman hands —it was the seat of powerful beys, such as the famous Ahmed Bey— and put up stubborn resistance to the French conquest of 1837. Its full history, from Cirta to the modern city, is told on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of ancient Numidia and Roman Africa: Constantine perched above its gorge, the museum-cities of Timgad and Djémila, among the finest in the whole Roman world, and Annaba, the homeland of Saint Augustine.
Read the history of The Roman north-east and Constantine →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Constantine is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It sits on an almost impregnable rock, ringed by the Rhumel gorge, which made it a naturally fortified, strategic spot from very early times. A settlement already stood here in the first millennium BC, and under the name Cirta it became the capital of the Berber kingdom of Numidia, one of the great powers of ancient North Africa.
Under Numidian kings such as Masinissa and Micipsa, in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, Cirta was a rich and powerful city, at once an ally and a rival of both Rome and Carthage. Masinissa, who had backed Rome against Carthage in the Punic Wars, made Cirta the centre of a prosperous kingdom. The city controlled a vast farming and trading territory and minted its own coins.
When Numidia fell into Rome's orbit, Cirta remained a city of the first rank. It came to lead a confederation of four cities (the 'Cirtan Confederation') and thrived as one of the region's main urban centres during the centuries of Roman rule, with forums, temples and monuments that have left traces still visible today.
The city's current name was born of a tragedy and a rebuilding. In the early 4th century AD, during the civil wars of the Roman Empire, Cirta was destroyed in the conflict between the emperor Maxentius and the usurper Domitius Alexander. The city was razed, and its recovery came from Maxentius's great rival and conqueror: Constantine I, known as Constantine the Great, the emperor who granted freedom to Christianity.
Around the year 313, Constantine ordered the city rebuilt, and in his honour it was renamed Constantina (Constantine). The new name sealed the city's bond with the emperor and with a new era: that of a Roman Empire now turned Christian. Throughout late antiquity Constantine remained an important centre, first Roman and later under Byzantine rule after Justinian's reconquest in the 6th century.
With the spread of Islam in the 7th century, Constantine became part of the Arab-Muslim world, never losing its character as a stronghold thanks to its natural position. Throughout the Middle Ages it was fought over by various Maghreb dynasties, and its walled rock, almost impossible to take by storm, kept it one of the key cities of the country's interior.
During the Ottoman period, from the 16th to the 19th century, Constantine was the seat of the Bey of the East, who governed the eastern region of the Regency of Algiers, and it was one of the country's most important and prosperous cities. It was ruled by beys who were nominally subject to the Dey of Algiers but enjoyed wide autonomy, and the city lived through centuries of commercial and cultural splendour. Its medina grew richer, mosques, baths and palaces went up, and a refined urban culture flourished.
The symbol of that era is the Palace of Ahmed Bey, built between 1826 and 1835 by the man who would be Constantine's last great bey, Hadj Ahmed Bey. It is one of the masterpieces of Ottoman architecture in Algeria: a complex of courtyards with marble-columned galleries, gardens, fountains and rooms decorated with tiles and frescoes showing the bey's travels to the East and to Mecca. The palace gives a sense of the luxury and power those rulers enjoyed.
Ahmed Bey was also a key figure in the resistance to the French invasion. When France conquered Algiers in 1830, he became one of the main leaders of the fight against the invaders in the east of the country, and Constantine turned into a bastion of that resistance. His story leads straight into the most dramatic episode in the city's 19th-century history.
Constantine was one of the places that held out longest against the French conquest. In 1836, a first French assault on the city, defended by Ahmed Bey and his men, ended in a resounding failure: the invading army had to withdraw with heavy losses, humbled by the natural strength of the rock and the resistance of its defenders. It was one of the few clear victories of the Algerian resistance in those years.
The following year, in October 1837, France came back with a much larger and better-prepared army and launched a second siege. After days of hard fighting and bombardment, the city finally fell by assault. The capture of Constantine was bloody and marked the end of organised resistance in the east; Ahmed Bey kept fighting in the interior for years before surrendering. The city came under French colonial rule, which would last until 1962.
Under colonisation, Constantine was transformed: the great bridges that made it famous were built — the Sidi Rached viaduct and the Sidi M'Cid suspension bridge, both opened in 1912, the latter partly the work of engineer Ferdinand Arnodin — European-style districts were laid out, and the city spread beyond its original rock. Those bridges, born of the need to connect a city surrounded by cliffs, paradoxically became its trademark and its greatest attraction.
Constantine also played its part in the struggle for independence. The city and its region saw major episodes of anti-colonial resistance, and the tensions of the War of Independence (1954-1962) were keenly felt here. After Algeria won independence in 1962, Constantine established itself as the great metropolis of the north-east and a leading university, industrial and administrative hub.
The city keeps a very strong cultural identity. It is the capital of 'malouf', the classical Andalusian music inherited from Al-Andalus, which is handed down here from generation to generation and is a source of local pride. It is also famous for its food and refined pastries, and for producing major figures in Algerian culture, such as the writers Malek Haddad and Kateb Yacine, who were born in the city or closely linked to it.
Today Constantine combines the weight of thousands of years of history — from Numidian Cirta to Constantine's city, from the Ottoman beys to the colonial bridges — with the life of a large modern city, with its university, tram, airport and cable car over the gorge. In 2015 it was Capital of Arab Culture, a recognition of its role in the country's intellectual history. For travellers, it remains one of Algeria's most astonishing and authentic cities: a city hanging over the abyss, steeped in centuries, unlike anywhere else.
