Algiers
Algeria's capital, the white city on the Mediterranean
Algiers tumbles down a steep amphitheater of hills to the Mediterranean, its dazzling whitewashed buildings earning it the old nickname Alger la Blanche, Algiers the White. The capital and largest city of Algeria, the largest country in Africa, it anchors a metropolitan area of roughly three million on the southern shore of the sea. The historic Casbah, a dense maze of Ottoman houses and alleys climbing the hillside, sits above grand French colonial boulevards along the waterfront — a layered cityscape that records every power that has held this strategic Maghreb coast.
The city curves around the Bay of Algiers, rising from the port up slopes that climb quickly into the Sahel hills behind. The Mediterranean climate brings mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers, and the steep terrain gives the older quarters their characteristic stacked, terraced form. The bright limestone and lime-washed walls that gleam against the blue sea define the city's look, while modern Algiers spreads east and west along the coastal plain and up into newer hillside districts, served by a metro and a busy Mediterranean port.
A Phoenician trading post in antiquity, Algiers was refounded as an Islamic city in 972 and became a notorious base of the Barbary corsairs under Ottoman rule, a power that ransomed captives across the Mediterranean for centuries. The French seized it in 1830 and made it the heart of colonial Algeria, and the brutal Battle of Algiers during the 1954–1962 war of independence remains seared into the city's memory and global cinema. Since independence it has been the political and cultural capital of Algeria, a hub of the Arab and Mediterranean worlds whose energy wealth flows through its institutions.