Walking through Timgad today is to feel genuinely dislocated in time. The main cardo and decumanus — the north-south and east-west arteries of any Roman town — are still paved with the original stones, deeply grooved by the wheels of ancient carts. At the western end, Trajan’s Arch rises 12 metres high, its carved stone almost impossibly sharp after nearly two millennia. The public library — one of the few Roman public libraries still identifiable — the theatre, the 14 bathhouses, the market square: all of it spreads across 50 hectares of the Aurès plateau, largely unvisited, largely unremarked by the world, absolutely extraordinary.
Take the drive through the Aurès mountains to get there. The landscape — gorges, Berber villages clinging to cliffs, almond orchards — is its own reward. UNESCO inscribed Timgad in 1982. It has never, somehow, become a tourist cliché.
6. Tassili n’Ajjer — The World’s First Gallery
Somewhere in the vast sandstone plateau of southeastern Algeria, in an area the size of England, there are an estimated 15,000 rock paintings and engravings. They begin more than 10,000 years ago, when the Sahara was green — when crocodiles swam in rivers that no longer exist, when hippos wallowed in the shade of trees that are now fossilised — and they run forward through time, recording the lives of people who had no other means of writing their history.
