Walking through Djémila is a quietly different experience from Timgad. Where Timgad is flat and legible as a diagram, Djémila rises and falls with the terrain. Stand at the Temple of Venus Genetrix and you look across the valley to blue mountains. The Arch of Caracalla, the House of the Donkey, the remarkably intact Theatre cut into the hillside — all of it sits in a landscape that feels genuinely remote, genuinely ancient. The Djémila Museum at the entrance holds statuary and, most powerfully, mosaics: the Triumph of Dionysus is so vivid, so alive with colour and movement, that you feel briefly convinced the craftsman must have only just set down his tesserae. UNESCO inscribed Djémila in 1982.
10. Tipaza — Where Camus Came to Think
Albert Camus wrote about Tipaza with a sensuous urgency that is rarely applied to archaeological sites: “In the spring, the gods inhabit Tipasa and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of wormwood leaves, in the silver armour of the sea, in the raw blue sky, in the flower-covered ruins, and in the great bubbles of light rolling among the stones.” He was not, on balance, wrong.
