The White City of the Mediterranean — where the UNESCO-listed Casbah's Ottoman-era alleyways descend in terraces to a French colonial boulevard wider than the Champs-Élysées, and the country that produced Albert Camus, Zinedine Zidane, and the most undervisited ancient Roman ruins in the world remains almost undiscovered by international tourism
Algiers (3.4 million; metro 5.5 million) is the capital and largest city of Algeria, the largest country in Africa by land area — a city of whitewashed terraces, Ottoman palaces, and French Belle Époque architecture cascading down steep hillsides to the Bay of Algiers and the Mediterranean Sea. The Casbah (listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992) is one of the best-preserved Arab-Ottoman medinas in North Africa — a dense urban fabric of narrow alleyways, palaces, mosques, and traditional hammams built between the 16th and 19th centuries on the hill above the modern city, where the Otto…
Algiers ('al-Jazā'ir' in Arabic — 'the islands', referring to islands now submerged in the harbour) was founded as a Berber settlement called Icosium by the Phoenicians (c. 900 BCE) and later developed as a Roman port town. The Ottoman corsair admiral Aruj Barbarossa captured Algiers in 1516 and his brother Hayreddin Barbarossa established the Ottoman regency of Algiers in 1529, which governed the city for 300 years under a system of elected deys (military governors). Algiers' corsair fleets (the Barbary pirates) raided Mediterranean shipping for centuries, enslaving an estimated 1–1.25 milli…