Algeria

Algeria's coast and mountains were home to Berber kingdoms — Numidia above all — that traded with Carthage and were then folded into the Roman Empire, which built the granaries, roads, and cities whose ruins at Timgad and Djémila are among the best preserved anywhere. Vandals and Byzantines followed, and then, from the seventh century, Arab armies brought Islam and, over generations, the Arabic language.

A succession of Berber and Arab dynasties ruled until the sixteenth century, when the coast came under the Ottomans as the semi-independent Regency of Algiers, a state known in Europe for its corsairs. In 1830 France invaded, and the conquest that followed was long and violent. Algeria became a settler colony governed as part of France itself, with a large European population and the Muslim majority excluded from full citizenship.

The war of independence began in 1954 and lasted until 1962; it was brutal on both sides and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The victorious FLN built a one-party socialist state funded by oil and gas. The army cancelled elections that Islamists were set to win in 1991, triggering a civil conflict through the 1990s that killed an estimated 150,000 people. Abdelaziz Bouteflika stabilised and then overstayed his welcome, and in 2019 the mass Hirak protest movement forced him out.

Algeria's rivalry with Morocco runs through its foreign policy: it is the main backer of the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara dispute, hosts around 170,000 Sahrawi refugees in camps near Tindouf in the southwest, and has kept its land border with Morocco closed since 1994, severing it again diplomatically in 2021.

Algeria is an Arab and Berber country and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, following the Maliki school. Berber identity is strongest in Kabylie, the mountainous region east of Algiers, and among the Chaoui, Mozabites, and Tuareg elsewhere; the long campaign to have Tamazight recognised succeeded in 2016.

Society is family-centred and, outside the big cities, socially conservative, with clear roles for hosts and guests and a strong obligation of hospitality — tea or coffee is offered before anything else is discussed. Algiers, Oran, and Constantine are more cosmopolitan, shaped by a century of French-language schooling and a lively press.

The country has an outsized cultural footprint for its population. It produced the writers Albert Camus, Kateb Yacine, and Assia Djebar; raï, the defiant popular music that came out of the bars and streets of Oran, went global in the 1980s; and football is a national obsession, tied up with memories of independence.

Algeria is young — a large share of the population is under 30 — and heavily urban, concentrated on the narrow coastal strip where most jobs, universities, and housing are. The state subsidises bread, fuel, and electricity, which keeps basic costs low but strains the budget whenever oil prices fall, and youth unemployment is the country's central social problem.

Life follows the Islamic week, with Friday the day of rest and communal prayer. Men gather in cafés; women's public presence varies a lot between liberal Algiers neighbourhoods and conservative small towns. Ramadan reorganises the whole month, with daytime shutdown and long, sociable evenings.

Everyday landmarks are the souk, the hammam, the neighbourhood bakery, and the extended family gathering on Fridays around a shared platter of couscous. In the Saharan oases, life is organised around the date harvest and the foggara irrigation channels that have watered the palm groves for centuries.

The national dish is couscous — steamed semolina topped with a stew of lamb or chicken and seasonal vegetables, and eaten especially on Fridays. Soups matter, above all chorba frik, a tomato-based broth with cracked wheat and meat that breaks the fast every evening in Ramadan.

Around these are stuffed vegetables (dolma), méchoui (whole roast lamb for celebrations), bourek (fried pastry rolls of meat or cheese), grilled merguez sausages, and chakhchoukha and rechta, both based on torn or hand-rolled pasta in sauce. The French left behind good bread and pastries, and Italian and Spanish influences show along the coast.

Sweets are honey-soaked and nut-heavy — makroud (semolina and date), baklawa, griwech — and served with mint tea or strong black coffee. The Saharan south grows some of the world's finest dates, the translucent Deglet Nour, and a bowl of them with fresh milk is the classic desert welcome.

The Sahara is the headline. Tassili n'Ajjer, a UNESCO site on a sandstone plateau near Djanet, holds thousands of prehistoric paintings and engravings of cattle, hunters, and a once-green Sahara, set among wind-carved rock "forests." Further west, the Hoggar (Ahaggar) Mountains rise in black volcanic spires around Tamanrasset, with the hermitage at Assekrem a classic spot for sunrise.

The Roman cities are the other great draw. Timgad, laid out on a grid by the emperor Trajan, still has its arch, forum, and theatre in the open plateau; Djémila occupies a spectacular hillside; and Tipasa sits right on the Mediterranean. All three are World Heritage Sites, as is the M'zab Valley, where five fortified Ibadi towns around Ghardaïa have kept a distinctive communal life for a thousand years.

In Algiers, the Casbah — the steep Ottoman citadel-quarter above the bay — is a World Heritage Site and the emotional heart of the city, though parts are crumbling. Constantine, further east, is dramatically split by a deep gorge and laced with bridges. The oasis town of Timimoun, red-walled against the Grand Erg Occidental, is the gentlest introduction to the desert.