Climb up to Santa Cruz Fort on the Murdjadjo mountain above the city, and the whole of Oran fans out below you — the port, the French-era boulevards, the tiled domes, the sea stretching blue and flat toward Spain. The fort itself is a Spanish construction from the 16th century, with a chapel to the Virgin Mary at the summit that feels oddly tender in context. The Casbah here is smaller and more approachable than Algiers’, a warren of lanes around the Grand Mosque and the old Turkish quarter.
Down on the flat, the Place du 1er Novembre 1954 is where city life happens — café terraces, children on bicycles, old men playing chess. The Ahmed Zabana National Museum holds a serious natural history and ethnographic collection. And in August, the waterfront heaves with Algerians on holiday, the beaches at Madagh and Les Andalouses packed with families, the evenings thick with the smell of grilled fish and the sound of Raï drifting from open windows.
4. Annaba — Augustine’s Ghost Town
In 430 AD, as the Vandals laid siege to the city then known as Hippo Regius, its bishop — Aurelius Augustinus, a man who had spent decades rewriting the intellectual foundations of Western Christianity — died inside its walls. The city survived him, changed its name to Annaba, and the ruins of Hippo Regius still lie on a low hill above the sea, where a mosaic floor here and a forum column there remind you that one of the most extraordinary minds of the late ancient world walked this exact ground.
