Before any foreign name existed, North Africa was the land of the Amazigh —the Berbers, “the free people”—, a group of indigenous peoples whose presence goes back to prehistory. In the Sahara, when it was still a green and humid savannah, these peoples and their ancestors left in the Tassili n’Ajjer and other massifs one of the largest galleries of rock art in the world, with scenes of hunting, cattle and dancing that are up to around twelve thousand years old.
In the first millennium BC, the Phoenicians founded trading posts on the coast, and from Carthage they spread their Punic influence along the shoreline. Inland, the Berbers organised themselves into kingdoms. During the Second Punic War, two great confederations —the Massylii and the Masaesyli— fought for power. From that struggle emerged the decisive figure of Masinissa, who, after allying with Rome and fighting alongside Scipio at the battle of Zama (202 BC), which sealed the defeat of Hannibal and Carthage, unified the Berber peoples into a single state: the kingdom of Numidia, with its capital at Cirta, present-day Constantine.
Masinissa ruled for decades until his death around 148 BC, and turned Numidia into an agricultural and military power. His grandson Jugurtha openly defied Rome in a long war (112-105 BC) that ended with his capture and death, and that heralded the end of Numidian independence. Little by little, the Berber kingdoms fell into Rome’s orbit, but Amazigh identity —its language, Tamazight, and its attachment to the land— outlived every empire that would come afterwards.
After the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC and the annexation of Numidia, Rome made the north of present-day Algeria one of the most prosperous regions of its empire. It was part of the provinces of Roman Africa and Mauretania Caesariensis, and became a vast granary: its plains produced the wheat and olive oil that fed Rome, and its cities flourished with forums, theatres, baths and triumphal arches.
Two of them are today jewels of world heritage. Timgad, ancient Thamugadi, was founded from scratch by the emperor Trajan around AD 100 as a colony for veterans of the Legio III Augusta; its almost perfect grid plan, with the cardo and decumanus crossing at right angles, its Arch of Trajan and even its public library made it a model of Roman town planning, “the Pompeii of Africa”. Djémila, ancient Cuicul, was built a little earlier, under the emperor Nerva, perched on a mountain spur almost 900 metres high, and preserves temples, forums and dazzling mosaics.
North Africa was also a major centre of early Christianity. Augustine, born in 354 in Thagaste, author of the Confessions and The City of God and one of the most influential thinkers in Western history, was bishop of the city of Hippo (present-day Annaba). Saint Augustine died in 430, during the siege of Hippo by the Vandals, the Germanic people who ravaged Roman Africa. After the Vandals came the Byzantines in the 6th century, who reconquered part of the territory, but Roman power was already fading and a new era was about to begin.
In the 7th century, the expansion of Islam from Arabia reached the Maghreb. The first Arab raids into North Africa began around 647, and in 670 the general Uqba ibn Nafi founded Kairouan, in neighbouring Tunisia, as a base for the conquest. But the advance was not easy: the Berbers put up fierce resistance, embodied by legendary figures such as King Kusaila and, above all, the Kahina (Dihya), a Berber warrior queen who towards the end of the 7th century led the struggle against the Umayyad armies before being defeated.
By the beginning of the 8th century, the Maghreb had been incorporated into the caliphate, and most Berbers adopted Islam, although they kept their language and many of their customs. Many joined the Muslim expansion enthusiastically: a large share of the armies that conquered the Iberian Peninsula from 711 onwards were made up of North African Berbers.
Islamisation did not erase the tensions. The Berbers, who often felt treated as second-class subjects by the Arab elites, frequently embraced currents of Islam that expressed their rebelliousness, such as Kharijism. In 740 a great Berber revolt broke out against the Umayyad caliphate, and from that ferment the first independent states of the Maghreb emerged. The Muslim religion and the Arabic language put down deep roots, but they merged with the Amazigh substrate into a cultural synthesis that defines Algeria to this day.
Between the 8th and 16th centuries, Algerian territory was the stage for a succession of dynasties, many of them Berber, that left a deep mark. The first was the Rustamid imamate, founded in 776 with its capital at Tahert (present-day Tiaret): an Ibadi state, austere and mercantile, which prospered thanks to the gold and slave routes that crossed the Sahara, until it was destroyed by the Fatimids in the 10th century.
The Fatimids, a Shia dynasty, were born precisely on Algerian soil, backed by the Kutama Berbers of Lesser Kabylia, before conquering Egypt and founding Cairo. When they moved east, they left the central Maghreb in the hands of their Berber allies, the Zirids and their branch, the Hammadids, who founded cities such as the Qal’a of Beni Hammad —today a World Heritage Site— and enlarged Béjaïa. In the 11th century, the arrival of the Arab tribes of the Banu Hilal transformed the human landscape and accelerated the Arabisation of the plains.
Later, two great Berber empires that arose in present-day Morocco —the Almoravids and the Almohads— unified the whole Maghreb and al-Andalus. When the Almohad empire crumbled in the 13th century, western Algeria passed to the Zayyanid (or Abdalwadid) dynasty, which made Tlemcen its brilliant capital for more than three centuries, a centre of Hispano-Moorish art, science and trade, until the arrival of the Ottomans.
At the beginning of the 16th century, the Algerian coast was caught between two forces: the Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, which after the fall of Granada was pushing into the Maghreb and occupying strongholds such as Oran (1509), and the Ottoman Empire, in full expansion across the Mediterranean. Into this context burst the Barbarossa brothers, corsairs of Greek origin in the service of Islam: Aruj seized Algiers in 1516, and after his death his brother Hayreddin placed the city under the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan in 1519.
Thus was born the Regency of Algiers, an Ottoman province with very broad autonomy, governed in turn by beylerbeys, pashas, aghas and, finally, deys. Algiers became one of the great corsair powers of the Mediterranean: its fleets attacked Christian ships and European coasts, taking captives who were ransomed or sold as slaves. It is estimated that over the centuries hundreds of thousands of Europeans passed through the bagnios of Algiers; among them, famously, was Miguel de Cervantes, held captive in the city between 1575 and 1580.
The Regency was a prosperous and feared state, with an identity of its own within the Ottoman world. But by the 18th and early 19th centuries its maritime power had declined in the face of European navies. The episode that hastened its end was diplomatic and almost absurd: in 1827, in a dispute over an unpaid debt, Dey Hussein struck the French consul with his fan or fly-whisk. France used that “insult” as a pretext to prepare an invasion that would change the country’s history.
On 5 July 1830, after a massive landing, French troops entered Algiers and Dey Hussein capitulated. What had begun as a punitive expedition turned into an enterprise of conquest and colonisation that would last more than a century. France annexed Algeria gradually and bloodily, turning it into something different from a simple colony: in 1848 it was declared an integral part of French territory, organised into departments as if it were an extension of mainland France on the other side of the Mediterranean.
Resistance was immediate and tenacious. Its great figure was Emir Abd el-Kader, a young religious and military leader who from 1832 onwards united numerous tribes of the west and the interior and built a genuine state, with an administration, an army and a mobile capital. For fifteen years he waged war against a far superior army, and although he signed truces such as the Treaty of Tafna (1837), the fighting resumed. Against him, General Bugeaud waged a scorched-earth war —brutal razzias, the destruction of crops and villages, and even the killing by suffocation of people sheltering in caves— that caused enormous loss of life. Abd el-Kader finally surrendered in 1847 and was exiled; today he is revered as the father of the Algerian nation.
Colonisation then advanced in full force. European settlers arrived —French, but also Spanish, Italian and Maltese— who would form the community of the pieds-noirs, and took over the best land. Muslims were dispossessed, subjected to a discriminatory legal regime (the “Code de l’indigénat”) and reduced to the status of subjects without full citizenship, while the Crémieux Decree of 1870 did grant French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. Uprisings such as the great Kabylia revolt of 1871 were harshly crushed. On that dispossession and that humiliation, Algerian nationalism was incubated over generations.
Algerian nationalism matured in the first half of the 20th century, fuelled by thinkers and activists such as Messali Hadj and Ferhat Abbas, and by frustration at the broken promises after the two world wars, in which many Algerians fought for France. A turning point was the Sétif and Guelma massacres of 8 May 1945: a nationalist demonstration, put down with extreme violence, left thousands of Muslims dead and marked an entire generation.
On 1 November 1954, the newly created National Liberation Front (FLN) launched a series of coordinated attacks that started the war of independence; that date, the “Toussaint Rouge”, is today Algeria’s national day. The conflict was long and atrocious on both sides. The FLN, through its armed wing, combined rural guerrilla warfare with urban bombings; France responded by deploying hundreds of thousands of soldiers, with systematic torture —documented during the so-called Battle of Algiers in 1957— and the forced displacement of millions of peasants into regroupment camps. The war deeply divided French society itself and, in 1958, brought about the fall of the Fourth Republic and Charles de Gaulle’s return to power.
After years of fighting and negotiations, the Évian Accords, signed on 18 March 1962, established a ceasefire, and an overwhelming referendum led to independence, proclaimed on 5 July 1962. The human cost was immense and the figures are still debated: historians estimate between several hundred thousand and nearly a million dead, while Algeria’s official memory speaks of a million and a half “martyrs”. The end was tinged with tragedy: the violence of the OAS terrorist organisation, the exodus of almost a million pieds-noirs, and the massacre of thousands of harkis —the Algerians who had served France— left to their fate. Algeria was born as a sovereign nation, but with wounds that would take generations to heal.
The young republic was born under the dominance of the FLN, which became the sole party. Its first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, was overthrown in 1965 in a coup by his defence minister, Houari Boumédiène, who ruled until his death in 1978, imposed a model of state socialism, nationalised hydrocarbons —the country’s great source of wealth— and projected Algeria as a leader of the Third World and the Non-Aligned Movement. He was succeeded by Chadli Bendjedid, under whose rule falling oil prices and social discontent led to the riots of October 1988.
Those protests forced a democratic opening and the end of the one-party system. But when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was on course to win the first multi-party legislative elections, the army cancelled the process in January 1992 and forced Bendjedid to resign. The Islamist reaction and the repression unleashed the “Black Decade”, an atrocious civil war that between 1992 and the early 2000s caused somewhere in the order of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand deaths, with massacres of entire villages whose perpetrators are still disputed. It was one of the most painful chapters in the country’s history, and it should be named soberly and with respect for its victims.
The war died down under the presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, elected in 1999, who promoted a policy of “civil concord” and governed for twenty years, marked by reconstruction but also by corruption and stagnation. In February 2019, when Bouteflika —elderly and ill— sought a fifth term, the Hirak broke out, a massive, peaceful popular movement that swept the whole country and secured his resignation in April that year. In December 2019 Abdelmadjid Tebboune was elected president. Today Algeria is an energy and regional power, young in its population and ancient in its history, still seeking a balance between its Amazigh and Arab heritage, the demands for freedom and the weight of a past as glorious as it is painful.
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Algiers rises like an amphitheatre above a Mediterranean bay, and its whitewashed houses earned it the nickname “Algiers the White” (Alger la Blanche). Its origins are ancient: on the same site stood Icosium, a modest Punic and later Roman town. But the Algiers we know was born in the 10th century: around 960, the Zirid Berber prince Bologhine ibn Ziri refounded the city on the Roman ruins.
Its Arabic name, al-Jazair, “the islands”, refers to some islets that lay off the coast and were later incorporated into the port. For centuries it was a port city of middling importance, fought over by Berber dynasties and under pressure from Spain.
Everything changed in the 16th century, when the Barbarossa corsairs took it and placed it under Ottoman sovereignty. Algiers then became the capital of the Regency, one of the great corsair powers of the Mediterranean, and the political centre from which the country would be governed up to the present day.
The historic heart of Algiers is the Casbah, an old town that cascades down from the Ottoman citadel to the port in a dizzying maze of alleys, stairways, houses with hidden courtyards, mosques and palaces. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, it is one of the most impressive Islamic urban ensembles in the Mediterranean, a witness to Ottoman Algiers.
The Casbah is not just an architectural treasure: it is a symbol. During the war of independence, its intricate tangle of alleys became the refuge and battlefield of FLN fighters. The famous Battle of Algiers of 1957, with its bombings, raids and torture, was fought largely in these streets, later immortalised in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film classic.
Today the Casbah, densely populated and partly run-down, is the focus of restoration efforts to preserve its unique fabric. Walking through it means immersing yourself both in corsair Algiers and in the memory of the struggle for freedom.
When France took Algiers in 1830, the city was transformed. The occupiers tore down part of the lower Casbah to open wide boulevards and built a European city of white, arcaded façades facing the sea, in the Haussmann style, which still defines the image of modern Algiers. On a hill rose the basilica of Notre-Dame d’Afrique, consecrated in 1872, with its famous inscription asking people to pray “for us and for the Muslims”.
Algiers was the centre of colonial power and, during the Second World War, after the Allied landings of 1942, it even became the capital of Free France in North Africa. It was later the main stage of the war of independence and, since 1962, the capital of sovereign Algeria.
Today Algiers is a metropolis of several million people, seat of government and engine of the country. It combines the Ottoman heritage of the Casbah, the French colonial architecture of the centre, monuments of the socialist era such as the imposing Maqam Echahid (the Martyrs’ Memorial) and modern neighbourhoods climbing the hills. It is a Mediterranean city, bustling and steeped in history.
Some seventy kilometres west of Algiers, on cliffs dropping into a turquoise sea, lie the ruins of Tipasa, one of the most beautiful archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. It was first a Punic trading post and then an important Roman and later early Christian city, with a forum, theatre, baths, villas and basilicas whose columns now stand out against the blue of the sea. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1982.
Tipasa is inseparably linked to Albert Camus, the French-Algerian writer born in 1913 near Annaba and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his lyrical essay “Nuptials at Tipasa” (Noces à Tipasa), Camus celebrated the sensual communion between the ruins, the sun, the sea and the flowers of this coast, turning it into one of the great literary places of the Mediterranean.
Nearby stands another enigmatic monument: the so-called Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania, a large circular stone tomb attributed to Queen Cleopatra Selene and King Juba II, a testament to the Berber-Roman kingdom that ruled this region. Within a few kilometres of coastline, Tipasa thus brings together the Punic, Roman, royal and literary memory of central Algeria.
East of Algiers, a massif of steep mountains and deep valleys forms Kabylia (Kabylie), the most emblematically Berber region of Algeria. Its inhabitants, the Kabyles, are an Amazigh people who, through every empire, held on to their language — Tamazight, in its Kabyle variety — their mountain villages and a strong traditional community organisation.
For centuries Kabylia's rugged geography was a refuge of independence. Resistance to the French conquest was especially fierce here, and in 1871 the great Mokrani revolt broke out, one of the largest uprisings against colonial rule, harshly crushed and followed by sweeping land confiscations.
In independent Algeria, Kabylia has also been the epicentre of the push for Amazigh identity. The “Berber Spring” of 1980 and the protests that followed demanded recognition of the Tamazight language and culture, which was eventually declared a national and official language. A land of emigration, of intellectuals and of a vibrant cultural life, Kabylia is the Berber soul of contemporary Algeria.
Tizi Ouzou is the capital of Greater Kabylia and the region's main urban centre, a hub of cultural, university and political life. Its name means “the pass of the broom bushes” in Kabyle. Surrounded by mountains and by traditional villages perched on the heights, it is the gateway to some of the most beautiful landscapes in northern Algeria.
To the south rises the Djurdjura massif, Kabylia's most imposing range, protected by a national park. Its peaks, which top 2,300 metres and are covered in snow in winter, its cedar forests, its waterfalls and its deep caves offer an astonishing contrast to the desert image usually associated with Algeria.
The Tizi Ouzou region is famous for its crafts — silver jewellery, pottery and textiles with the characteristic Berber geometric patterns — and for its music, which brought Kabyle artists such as Idir and Lounès Matoub to the world. It is a land of strong identity, where mountain scenery and Amazigh culture merge into a unique experience.
On the coast, at the foot of the mountains of Lesser Kabylia, lies Béjaïa, a Mediterranean port of great beauty and surprising history. It was Roman Saldae, but its great moment came in the Middle Ages: around 1090 it became the capital of the Berber Hammadid dynasty, who built it up into one of the most prosperous and cultured cities of the Maghreb, with a port, an arsenal and madrasas.
Medieval Béjaïa — which Europeans called Bugia — even gave us an everyday word: thanks to its exports of candle wax, the city lent its name to “bougie”, French for candle. But its most astonishing legacy is mathematical: at the end of the 12th century, the young Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci, learned the Hindu-Arabic numeral system here, where his father was a merchant, and on returning to Italy he spread it across Europe in his famous “Liber Abaci”. The numbers we use today passed through Béjaïa.
Later the city went through a brief Spanish occupation and the Ottoman period before French colonisation. Today Béjaïa is a lively port and a base for exploring the Kabyle coast, with Gouraya National Park above the city, the picturesque Corniche and coves of crystal-clear water such as those of Cape Carbon. Nature, history and Amazigh culture all come together in this corner of the Mediterranean.
Tlemcen, in the far north-west of the country near the border with Morocco, is one of Algeria's most refined cities. On a site with Roman roots (Pomaria), it flourished under the Berber dynasties and reached its peak between 1235 and 1554 as capital of the kingdom of the Zayyanids (or Abdalwadids), who made it a great political, commercial and cultural centre of the Maghreb.
As a crossroads of routes between the Sahara, the Maghreb and al-Andalus, Tlemcen filled up with scholars, merchants and artists, many of them Andalusians fleeing the Reconquista. That golden age left splendid monuments: the Great Mosque, from the Almoravid period (late 11th century), with its exquisite mihrab; the ruins of Mansourah, the fortified city the Marinids built to besiege it; and the Sidi Boumediene complex, dedicated to a revered Sufi saint.
Tlemcen is regarded as a capital of Hispano-Moorish art and of Andalusian music in Algeria, and in 2011 it was named “capital of Islamic culture”. Surrounded by waterfalls, olive groves and plateaus, it keeps an aristocratic, Andalusian air that sets it apart from the rest of the country.
Oran, Algeria's second city, was founded around the year 903 by Andalusian sailors and merchants, and its history was shaped by its closeness to the Iberian Peninsula. In 1509, as part of the Catholic Monarchs' expansion into the Maghreb, Spain conquered the city and held it, with interruptions, for almost three centuries, until 1792, leaving imposing fortifications such as Fort Santa Cruz, which watches over the bay from a mountaintop.
After the Spanish withdrawal, Oran came under the Ottoman Regency of Algiers, and in the 19th century it became one of the main cities of French Algeria, with a large community of Spanish settlers. With independence in 1962, it saw the mass exodus of its European population. Camus set his famous novel “The Plague” in Oran, using the city as the stage for his parable about evil and solidarity.
Today Oran is a cheerful, musical Mediterranean city, known worldwide as the birthplace of raï, a popular genre born in its neighbourhoods that blends tradition and modernity and was taken to international fame by artists such as Khaled. With its mix of Andalusian, Spanish, Ottoman and French heritage, Oran embodies the cosmopolitan character of north-western Algeria.
North-western Algeria, the historic region of Oran (Oranie), has always been a borderland. Its closeness to Morocco and Spain made it a place of exchange and conflict: Spanish armies landed here, Moriscos expelled from the peninsula took refuge here, and Berber, Arab, Andalusian and European cultures mixed here for centuries.
That frontier condition left a unique cultural mark. The Andalusian music of Tlemcen and the popular raï of Oran, so different from each other, were both born of this meeting of traditions. The region's language, food and customs still carry loanwords and echoes of every people that passed through it.
Today the north-west is one of the most dynamic and populous regions of the country, with Oran as its great economic and cultural hub and Tlemcen as the keeper of its noblest memory. Travelling through it means following the thread of al-Andalus and the western Mediterranean on African soil.
Constantine is one of the oldest and most spectacular cities in Algeria. Perched on a rock cut through by the deep gorge of the Rhummel river, it was ancient Cirta, capital of the kingdom of Numidia and seat of the great Berber king Masinissa in the 2nd century BC. Its almost impregnable position made it a coveted stronghold for thousands of years.
Its current name comes from the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who rebuilt it after it had been destroyed and gave it his name around the year 313. Under Rome, Cirta-Constantine was a rich, populous city, capital of a confederation of colonies. It later passed into Vandal, Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman hands, always keeping its role as the great centre of eastern Algeria.
Its most astonishing feature is its bridges. Split by the Rhummel gorge, the city is stitched together by a series of dizzying crossings — such as the Sidi M’Cid suspension bridge, opened in 1912 and for a time one of the highest in the world — which earned it the nickname “the city of bridges”. With its medina, its Ottoman mosques and its palaces, Constantine is also a centre of Andalusian music and of Algeria's scholarly tradition.
On a bare plain at the foot of the Aurès mountains lies Timgad, ancient Thamugadi, perhaps the best surviving example of Roman town planning. It was founded from scratch by the emperor Trajan around AD 100 as a colony for veterans of the Legio III Augusta, and laid out on an almost perfect grid, with the cardo and the decumanus crossing at its centre.
Buried for centuries under the desert sands, Timgad was remarkably well preserved. Today you can walk its paved streets, still marked by cart wheels, and see its forum, its theatre for thousands of spectators, its baths, its Arch of Trajan and even the remains of a public library, a rare luxury in the ancient world. An inscription found in the city sums up its inhabitants' spirit with humour: “to hunt, to bathe, to play and to laugh: that is living”.
Timgad thrived as an agricultural and Christian centre until it was sacked by the Vandals and by Berber raids, and was finally abandoned. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1982. Losing yourself among its golden ruins, with the mountains in the background, is one of the most striking experiences Roman Algeria has to offer.
If Timgad amazes with its geometric layout on the plain, Djémila — whose name means “the beautiful” in Arabic — wins you over with its setting. Ancient Cuicul was founded under the emperor Nerva, at the end of the 1st century, on a narrow rocky spur almost 900 metres up, between two ravines. Roman engineers had to adapt the ideal city plan to the rugged terrain, and the result was an urban ensemble of rare harmony.
Djémila preserves a forum, temples, basilicas, arches, markets and houses, and above all an extraordinary collection of mosaics, now gathered in its museum, which rank among the most beautiful in the Roman world. It was also an important Christian centre in late antiquity, with its basilicas and its baptistery.
Like Timgad, Djémila was abandoned after the invasions and lay forgotten until it was excavated in the 20th century. Inscribed on the UNESCO list in 1982, it is one of the best-preserved Roman sites in the world. Together, Timgad and Djémila make north-eastern Algeria a first-rate destination for anyone who wants to understand the splendour of Roman Africa.
On the north-east coast, near the border with Tunisia, lies Annaba, a laid-back Mediterranean city that was one of the great cities of antiquity: Roman Hippo (Hippo Regius), former capital of Numidian kings and later a thriving Roman city and port.
Hippo is famous above all for Saint Augustine, one of the most influential thinkers in the history of the West. Born in 354 in nearby Thagaste, Augustine was bishop of Hippo from 396 until his death in 430, while the Vandals were besieging the city. There he wrote much of his work, including the Confessions and The City of God. On the hill overlooking the ruins of Hippo, the French built the monumental Basilica of Saint Augustine at the end of the 19th century; it holds a relic of the saint and is still a place of pilgrimage.
Today Annaba is an important industrial city and port, with Mediterranean beaches, a lively historic centre and the evocative ruins of Hippo, where columns and mosaics remind you that one of the great Fathers of the Church lived and died here. It is Algeria's eastern gateway and a crossroads of Roman, Christian and Arab history.
In the middle of the desert, some 600 kilometres south of Algiers, the M’zab valley holds one of the most original urban ensembles in the world. There, around the year 1050 and in the centuries that followed, an Ibadi Muslim community — the Mozabites, heirs to the austere, dissident Islam that had already flourished in the Rustamid kingdom — founded five fortified oasis-cities (ksour): Ghardaïa, Beni Isguen, Melika, Bou Noura and El Atteuf.
Each city follows the same pattern: a pyramid of ochre, pink and white earthen houses climbing a hill up to the mosque, whose minaret presides over the whole like a lighthouse. Ringed by walls and by ingeniously irrigated palm groves, these cities embody a communal, egalitarian urbanism perfectly adapted to the extreme desert climate.
That functional perfection fascinated modern architects: Le Corbusier visited the M’zab and drew inspiration from it, and Fernand Pouillon openly admired it. UNESCO inscribed the valley on its World Heritage list in 1982. The Mozabites, also famous for their hard-working commercial skills, keep their religious and social traditions alive to this day, which makes the M’zab a place as beautiful as it is singular.
Ghardaïa is the largest and liveliest of the M’zab cities, and its real capital. Founded in the 11th century, it spreads out like an amphitheatre around its mosque, with narrow streets that rise and fall and, at its heart, a famous arcaded souk of almost triangular shape, one of the most picturesque markets in the Sahara.
The city holds firmly to the customs of the Ibadi community: restricted quarters, strict community rules and an intense religious life. In Beni Isguen, the most conservative of the five cities, visitor access is regulated and a curious traditional auction is still held at sunset.
Ghardaïa is also a major crafts centre — wool rugs with geometric patterns, jewellery, copperware — and the gateway to the Sahara for many travellers. Its earthen architecture, its palm groves and its age-old way of life make it one of the most fascinating stops in southern Algeria, where the desert and a unique urban civilisation have lived side by side for a thousand years.
Further west, in the Gourara region, on the edge of the Grand Erg Occidental —one of the Sahara's great seas of dunes—, lies Timimoun, known as "the red oasis" for the ochre, reddish colour of its earth and its buildings. For many, it is one of the most photogenic sights in the whole Algerian Sahara.
Its architecture is Sudanese in style: mud-brick walls decorated with geometric motifs and pointed crenellations, in a reddish tone that glows in the light of sunset. All around stretch palm groves and a string of villages and oases fed by the foggaras, an ingenious system of underground galleries that taps groundwater and carries it by gravity to the crops, an ancient technology handed down over centuries.
Timimoun and the Gourara are also a hub of Saharan culture, with a population that blends Berber, Arab and African roots, and with their own musical and festive traditions, such as the ahellil, a collective chant of the Gourara recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. With its dunes, its palm trees and its red earth, Timimoun is one of the great gateways to Algeria's deep Sahara.
In the far south-east of the country, near Djanet, stretches the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau, a lunar landscape of "stone forests", natural arches and canyons carved by erosion over millions of years. But its greatest treasure is not geological but artistic: its rock walls hold one of the largest and oldest rock art galleries in the world, with thousands of paintings and engravings dating back as far as some twelve thousand years.
These images are an astonishing record of the Sahara's past. They show that this desert, today one of the driest places on Earth, was at other times a green, humid savannah, home to elephants, giraffes, hippos and crocodiles, and inhabited by hunters and by herders with their flocks. The scenes of hunting, dancing, cattle and daily life make it possible to follow, millennium by millennium, the drying of the Sahara and the transformation of its peoples.
UNESCO recognised the outstanding value of the Tassili n’Ajjer by inscribing it as a World Heritage Site in 1982, for its archaeological wealth as well as for its geology and biodiversity. Exploring its plateaus with Tuareg guides is a journey both to a landscape from another planet and to the origins of art and of humankind.
Djanet is the great oasis of south-eastern Algeria and the gateway to the Tassili and the deep desert. It is a town of palm groves and earthen houses inhabited mainly by the Tuareg, the nomadic Berber people of the Sahara, known for their "blue men" —after the indigo of their turbans— and for an age-old culture adapted to the desert, with its Tamahaq language and its Tifinagh script.
South of Djanet lies the Tadrart Rouge, a spectacular corner of gigantic orange dunes, stone arches, canyons and fossil lakes, considered one of the most beautiful landscapes in the whole Sahara. It is explored in 4x4 vehicles, camping under the stars, with the essential guidance of the Tuareg, who know every track and every water source in this vast, roadless territory.
Djanet is also a centre of Tuareg culture, with its festivals, its music and its silver and leather crafts. Its unhurried pace, its sunsets over the dunes and its crystal-clear night sky make the region one of the most intense experiences Algeria offers to anyone who ventures into the heart of the Sahara.
In the centre of the Algerian Sahara rises the Hoggar (Ahaggar), a volcanic massif of breathtaking beauty, a world of basalt spires, sharp peaks and black plateaus towering above the desert. Its summits, such as Mount Tahat, the highest in Algeria, exceed 2,900 metres, and the cool mountain air contrasts with the heat of the surrounding plains.
Its most famous spot is the Assekrem, at over 2,700 metres, renowned for its sunrises and sunsets, when the light sets the jagged outlines of the volcanic peaks ablaze in one of the most impressive natural spectacles on the planet. There, in 1911, the French priest and explorer Charles de Foucauld built a hermitage to live among the Tuareg; his figure, and his pioneering study of the Tamahaq language, remain bound to these mountains.
The region's capital is Tamanrasset, an oasis that is the great Tuareg centre of the south and the base for exploring the massif, always with local guides and permits. The Hoggar is the territory of the Kel Ahaggar, a Tuareg confederation historically led by a supreme chief, the amenokal. Volcanic landscapes, desert spirituality and Tuareg culture come together in this legendary corner of Algeria's great South.
Hardly anything that happened to Algeria happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
