The Northern Sahara and the Roman East
Algeria is larger than Morocco and Tunisia several times over and takes a small fraction of their visitors. This is the workable half of it — Algiers and Tipaza, a flight south to the Ibadi towns of the M'Zab, the sunken palm gardens of the Souf, then north through the Aurès to Timgad and Djémila, which are among the most complete Roman cities anywhere and have almost nobody in them.
Algiers and the Casbah
The Casbah falls from the Ottoman citadel to the harbour in about a kilometre of stairs and covered alleys. UNESCO listed it in 1992 and it has been in structural crisis for most of the time since — houses come down in winter rains and the restoration programme has been relaunched repeatedly under different ministries. Go in with a guide from one of the associations that work there: not because it is dangerous, but because it is genuinely unnavigable. Bastion 23 on the seafront, three surviving Ottoman palaces, is the calm version of the same architecture.
Algiers, 1954 to 1962
The Maqam Echahid, three concrete palm fronds on the heights above the bay, opened in 1982 for the twentieth anniversary of independence and has the Musée du Moudjahid underneath it. Down in the city, the Milk Bar on Place Emir Abdelkader was bombed on 30 September 1956; the house where Ali la Pointe was killed by explosive charge on 8 October 1957 is marked in the Casbah. Pontecorvo filmed The Battle of Algiers on these streets in 1965 with Saadi Yacef, who had run the FLN network in the Casbah, producing it and playing a version of himself.
Tipaza and the Mauretanian mausoleum
Seventy kilometres west along the coast. Tipaza was a Punic trading post, then a Roman colony, and its ruins sit directly on the sea with nothing built over them; there is a stele on the site carrying a line from Camus, whose Noces à Tipasa — written here in the mid-1930s, collected in Noces in 1939 — is about this exact ground. Inland on the ridge is Kbour er Roumia, a circular drum of dressed stone about sixty metres across raised in the first century BC and generally read as the tomb of Juba II and Cleopatra Selene II.
South to Ghardaïa
An hour in the air and the country stops being Mediterranean. The M'Zab valley was settled by Ibadi Muslims who withdrew into the Sahara after their Rustamid state at Tahert was destroyed in 909, and the five towns they built are still Ibadi, still walled, and still run by their own religious councils. Ghardaïa itself spirals up a hill to its mosque with the market arcade at the bottom. Le Corbusier came here in 1931 and took notes he used for the rest of his life.
The pentapolis
El Atteuf is the oldest, founded in 1012, and its mosque of Sidi Brahim is the whitewashed cube that architects keep drawing. Bou Noura and Melika sit between. Beni Isguen is the strict one: the gates still close at night, outsiders may only enter accompanied by a local guide, photography is restricted, and in the late afternoon a crier walks goods round the square in an auction that has been run the same way for centuries.
East across the Grand Erg
A long transfer day and the one that shows you the scale of the country: Ouargla, Touggourt and then the dunes of the Souf. This is oilfield country and the road carries the traffic to prove it, so leave early and expect checkpoints where the passport and the hotel booking are looked at without much comment.
The ghouts
El Oued roofs its houses in low domes because there is no timber to span anything, and it grows its dates in ghouts — funnels dug down through the dune until the palm roots reach the water table, so the garden sits in a crater rather than on the flat. It is one of the more elegant pieces of pre-industrial engineering in the Sahara and it is failing: irrigation return flow and untreated sewage have been raising the water table since the 1990s, drowning roots in the lower ghouts, and the state has been pumping to hold it down.
North-west to Biskra
Out of the sand and into the Ziban, the belt of date oases along the foot of the Aurès. Biskra was the winter resort the French built for themselves — Gide set part of L'Immoraliste here, and Béla Bartók came in 1913 to make the first phonograph recordings of Arab music in the region. The Deglet Nour dates that Europe buys at Christmas are grown in the palm groves you drive through to get in.
Into the Aurès
The gorge at El Kantara is called the mouth of the Sahara and it is a literal doorway: desert on one side, apricot orchards on the other. Beyond it the road climbs into Chaoui Berber country and the Gorges de Tighanimine, where the first shots of the war of independence were fired on 1 November 1954. The Balcons de Ghoufi are the set piece — village houses hollowed and built into the wall of the Oued el-Abiod canyon, abandoned from the 1970s onward as people moved to the plateau.
Timgad and Lambaesis
Trajan founded Thamugadi around AD 100 as a settlement for time-served legionaries and it was laid out in one go on a perfect grid, which is why it reads like a plan rather than a ruin. Nothing was built over it — it was abandoned after the Arab conquest and the sand kept it until excavation began in 1881. Look for the library, paid for by a private citizen, and the forum slab reading venari lavari ludere ridere occest vivere: to hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh, that is to live. Twelve kilometres from Batna, Lambaesis was the fortress of the Third Augustan Legion, and the French built a penal colony beside it in 1852 that is still a working prison.
Sétif
Roman Sitifis, now a high, cold, businesslike city at about 1,100 metres with the Ain El Fouara fountain in the middle of it. The museum holds the Triumph of Dionysus mosaic, which is worth the stop on its own. On 8 May 1945, while Europe celebrated the German surrender, a march here ended with the police shooting the flag-bearer; the rioting that followed killed around a hundred European settlers, and the French reprisals across Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata killed thousands — French estimates run from about 1,500 upward, Algerian accounts very much higher, and the figure has never been agreed.
Djémila, then Constantine
Cuicul was founded under Nerva around AD 96 for veterans and sits at 900 metres in a fold of hills, which is why the light is different from every other Roman site in the country and why the mosaics were left alone. Give it the morning: the Severan temple, the Christian quarter, and a museum of floor mosaics that would be the main attraction of a European capital. Then two hours on to Constantine.
Constantine and Tiddis
Ancient Cirta, capital of Numidia, rebuilt and renamed by Constantine in AD 313, standing on a rock that the Rhumel has cut away on three sides. The Sidi M'Cid suspension bridge of 1912 hangs roughly 175 metres above the gorge floor and was briefly the highest in the world. The Palace of Ahmed Bey, built between 1826 and 1835 by the last bey before the French took the city in 1837, is a courtyard sequence of painted galleries that nobody expects. Thirty kilometres out, Tiddis is a small Roman hill town built on red laterite, and empty.
Annaba and Hippo Regius
Two and a half hours by train to the coast. Augustine was bishop of Hippo from 395 until he died here on 28 August 430 with the Vandals outside the walls, and the excavated town below the hill is where he wrote the Confessions and most of the City of God. The basilica above was put up by the French between 1881 and 1900 and is visible from the sea. Camus was born at Dréan, forty minutes inland, which closes a circle that began at Tipaza on day three. Fly out from Annaba the same evening, or take the night train back to Algiers.
Good to know
Almost everyone needs a visa arranged in advance at an Algerian consulate, with confirmed hotel bookings or a letter of invitation, an itinerary, proof of funds and a wait that is realistically several weeks; refusals happen and are not explained. The visa-on-arrival scheme introduced in 2023 applies only to travellers flying into a southern airport — Djanet and Tamanrasset above all — on a Saharan programme booked through an agency approved by the tourism ministry, so it does nothing for a trip that starts in Algiers. The deep south is the part that is genuinely gated: the Saharan wilayas of Tamanrasset, Illizi and Djanet, Adrar, Tindouf and Bordj Badji Mokhtar — so Tassili n'Ajjer and the Hoggar both — require a licensed Algerian operator and an authorised guide, and the border strips with Mali, Niger, Libya and Mauritania are closed outright; the frontier with Morocco has been shut since 1994. This route deliberately stops north of that line: Ouargla, crossed in transit on day six, is the southernmost point on it, and nothing here needs an operator licence, though a driver booked through a local agency still makes the paperwork easier. Read your own foreign ministry before booking rather than after, because several advise against all but essential travel to parts of Kabylie and to the Saharan wilayas, and standard travel insurance voids inside an advised-against area — either buy cover that does not or accept that you are uninsured for those days. Expect to be assigned a gendarmerie escort on some interior and southern road legs, handed over from one wilaya to the next; it is not negotiable, it adds time, and it means your itinerary is known in advance, which is a reason to book a driver through a local agency that files the plan properly. Money is the other thing to get right: the dinar is a closed currency you cannot buy abroad, foreign cards are close to useless outside two or three hotels in Algiers, ATMs will not reliably serve you, and the bank rate and the parallel rate differ by a wide margin, so you bring euros in cash, declare them on the customs form on arrival and keep the form. The Saharan legs are unusable from June to September, when El Oued and Biskra sit above 45°C; the same months are the only comfortable ones in the Aurès, which is at 1,000 metres and does get snow that closes the canyon roads in January and February. October to April is the season for this itinerary as written. Arabic and Tamazight are the official languages and French is the working second one — English gets you very little outside Algiers hotels. Friday is the main day of the weekend and sites and museums keep reduced or closed hours around it; Ramadan shifts about eleven days earlier each year and changes opening times everywhere without shutting the archaeological sites. Alcohol is legal, sold discreetly and absent from most restaurants.
Shorter or longer?
Fly Algiers to Djanet and give the plateau seven more days with a licensed Algerian operator — guide, permits and camp crew are compulsory and there is no independent version of this. Book the operator before you touch the visa: they file the application. The visa-on-arrival concession is narrower than it sounds, though — it works only if the Sahara is the entire trip and you land at Djanet or Tamanrasset from abroad. Bolted onto the fourteen days above, which begin in Algiers, it does not apply and you are back at the consulate.
Algiers, Tipaza, then straight east by train to Constantine — six hours — for Djémila, Timgad and Annaba. Drops the flight and the whole Saharan loop, and it is the version that still works in June when the south is at 45°C. You still need a car for two days out of Constantine: Djémila is 110 km off and Timgad 180, which is a long day trip unless you sleep a night at Batna.