Attractions & Natural Wonders · Algeria
Algeria: Ten Attractions and Natural Wonders
The best-preserved Roman cities in the world, a living hill-town casbah, and a desert of sandstone towers, volcanic peaks, and 8,000-year-old paintings
By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026
Africa's largest country, and one of its least visited
Algeria is the biggest country in Africa, and for its size it gets remarkably few tourists. That is slowly changing. The north has a Mediterranean coast, green mountains, and the two best-preserved Roman cities anywhere; the south is pure Sahara, with painted rock shelters and forests of eroded stone. Visas have loosened, especially for organised desert trips through Djanet and Tamanrasset.
The ten places below run from the coast to the deep desert. The north is easy to travel independently; the Saharan sites require a licensed agency and a guide, partly for the terrain and partly for security rules that still apply in the far south. Spring and autumn are best everywhere; the desert is a winter destination.
1. Timgad
The emperor Trajan founded Timgad around AD 100 as a settlement for army veterans, and laid it out as a textbook Roman town: a dead-straight grid of streets inside a square wall, with a forum, a theatre for 3,500 people, a library, and fourteen bath complexes. Then the desert took it. Sand buried the whole city for a thousand years, which is exactly why so much survives.
Excavated from the 1880s, Timgad is now one of the most legible Roman towns in existence — you walk its actual paved streets, past the ruts left by cart wheels, under the 12-metre Arch of Trajan. It sits near Batna in the Aurès Mountains, and gets a fraction of the visitors that a comparable site in Italy would.
2. Djémila
If Timgad is the Roman town that followed the rulebook, Djémila — a couple of hours north, at 900 metres in the mountains of Sétif Province — is the one that adapted to its site. The builders had to fit the forum, temples, and market between ridges and ravines, so the streets curve and the squares sit at angles to each other.
The setting is half the appeal: green hills, cooler air, and a well-kept museum full of the mosaic floors lifted from the town's villas. Djémila (the name is Arabic for "beautiful") is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, like Timgad, is usually near-empty when you visit.
3. The Casbah of Algiers
The Casbah is the old core of Algiers: a dense triangle of whitewashed houses, Ottoman palaces, and tiny mosques tumbling down a steep hillside to the sea. It grew under the Ottomans from the 16th century, and its lanes are so narrow and stepped that nothing wheeled can enter. During the war of independence it was the heart of the resistance, a story told in the film The Battle of Algiers.
It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a working neighbourhood, parts of it fragile and propped up with scaffolding. Go with a local guide: the alleys are a maze, some buildings are unsafe, and a guide gets you inside a restored palace or two.
4. The M'Zab Valley (Ghardaïa)
In a rocky valley on the northern edge of the Sahara, the Mozabites — a distinct Ibadi Muslim community — built five compact walled towns from the 11th century onward, each climbing a hillock to a pyramid-topped minaret. The design was so admired that Le Corbusier studied it. Ghardaïa is the largest and the market centre; Beni Isguen, still gated at night, is the most intact.
The M'Zab is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a conservative one — Beni Isguen has rules about photography and dress, and non-residents may need a local guide to enter. It is also one of the best places in Algeria to buy carpets, woven by Mozabite women to old geometric patterns.
5. Tassili n'Ajjer
Tassili n'Ajjer is a sandstone plateau the size of a small country, eroded into thousands of pillars, arches, and slot canyons — a "forest of rock." It also holds one of the greatest concentrations of prehistoric art on Earth: more than 15,000 painted and engraved figures, some 8,000 years old, showing a green Sahara of cattle, giraffes, and hippos.
Visiting means a multi-day expedition from Djanet with a licensed agency, camping among the rocks and walking to the painted shelters. It is remote, cold at night in winter, and completely unlike anywhere else. A UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its geology and its art.
6. Constantine, the City of Bridges
Constantine sits on a plug of rock almost entirely encircled by the deep gorge of the Rhummel River, which drops up to 200 metres straight down. To function as a city at all it has had to bridge the chasm again and again, and the result is spectacular: footbridges, road bridges, and the vertiginous Sidi M'Cid suspension bridge slung across the void.
The city is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world, capital of Numidia before the Romans renamed it for the emperor Constantine. The old town on the rock, the bridges, and the palace of the last Ottoman bey are the reasons to come.
7. Oran and the Fort of Santa Cruz
Oran, Algeria's second city, is the country's most relaxed and outward-looking — the birthplace of raï music and a place with a strong Spanish and French imprint. High above it, on Murdjadjo mountain, the Spanish-built Fort of Santa Cruz looks down over the harbour, next to a 19th-century pilgrimage chapel; the view along the coast from up here is the best in the city.
Down in town, the old Spanish quarter, the former cathedral, the seafront, and the grand colonial-era theatre make an easy day's walking. Oran is also the usual jumping-off point for the beaches west along the coast.
8. Maqam Echahid and modern Algiers
Algeria's independence, won from France in 1962 after a brutal eight-year war, is central to national identity, and the Martyrs' Memorial states it in concrete: three enormous curved fronds — palm leaves, or standing figures — rising 92 metres above the city and joining over an eternal flame.
The monument crowns a hill above the Jardin d'Essai, a lush 19th-century botanical garden that is one of the nicest places in the capital to spend an hour. Together with the new Great Mosque of Algiers nearby — its minaret the tallest in the world — they make the modern counterweight to the Ottoman Casbah below.
9. Tipaza and the coast
An hour west of Algiers, Tipaza was a Punic trading post and then a Roman port, and its ruins have the best setting of any ancient site in the country: they sit right on the Mediterranean, with columns and a basilica looking out over the water and Mount Chenoua rising behind. The writer Albert Camus, who grew up in Algiers, set an essay here about swimming among the stones.
It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an easy half-day from the capital, and it pairs well with the Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania, a huge circular stone tomb of the local kings on a hill nearby. The province is also where people from Algiers go to the beach.
10. The Hoggar Mountains and Assekrem
Far to the south, near Tamanrasset, the Hoggar is a range of black volcanic peaks and plugs rising straight out of the flat Sahara — a landscape so different from the rest of Algeria that it barely seems part of the same country. Assekrem, a 2,700-metre viewpoint at its heart, is where the French hermit and explorer Charles de Foucauld built a small stone retreat in 1911, and where visitors now climb for sunrise and sunset views ranked among the finest in the Sahara.
Reaching it means the same kind of licensed-agency expedition as Tassili n'Ajjer, usually combined with it as part of a longer southern circuit out of Tamanrasset. Nights at altitude are cold even when the days are fierce.
Algeria takes more planning than most Mediterranean countries — some sites need a guide, the desert needs an agency — but that is also why Timgad is empty and the Casbah still feels like a neighbourhood rather than an attraction.