The Hippo Regius archaeological site is compact and moving — a Roman forum, baths, a basilica and some of the finest in-situ mosaics you’ll find anywhere. Beside the ruins, a small museum collects the overflow. Looming above both is the Basilica of Saint Augustine, a 19th-century French construction in Romano-Byzantine style that holds a relic of the saint’s arm. The combination of ancient ruin and 19th-century homage is odd but strangely affecting.
Annaba’s modern city is a Mediterranean port town of genuine appeal — a French-era seafront, a bustling corniche, and the mountain village of Seraidi a short drive above it, cool and forested, where paragliders launch off the hillside in summer and the views over the bay are nothing short of staggering. The nearby hot springs at Hammam Debagh are a local institution.
5. Timgad — The Pompeii of Africa
The Roman city of Thamugadi was founded by the Emperor Trajan in the year AD 100, built in a single campaign on a rigidly perfect square grid to house retired legionary soldiers. It was, in the Roman world, what a planned community would be today — functional, orderly, designed to a template. Then history moved on, the Vandals, the Byzantines and finally the sands of the Aurès mountains arrived, and Timgad sank beneath them for more than a thousand years. When French archaeologists began uncovering it in 1881, they found something close to a miracle: a Roman city preserved in extraordinary detail, its street plan still legible, its stones largely in place.
