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The capital and largest city of Algeria, in the north on the Bay of Algiers, an arm of the Mediterranean Sea. An ancient North African port, Algiers was captured by French forces in 1830 and was later a pivotal center of the struggle for Algerian independence. Population: 1,980,000.
For more information on Algiers, visit Britannica.com.
Capital of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria.
Algiers is located at the northwestern end of a large bay in the Mediterranean Sea. The city's industrial activity is concentrated to the south and east, on the plain of the Mitidja. The region contains 48 percent of the country's factories and 55 percent of its industrial workforce. In 2003, it had a population of 3 million.
The city's origins reach back to the Phoenicians and Romans (300 B.C.E. - 100 C.E.). Berbers reestablished Algiers in the ninth century, naming it al-Jazaʾir (islands) because of rock outcroppings in the bay. In the early sixteenth century, Algiers was drawn into Castile's overseas expansion and the Ottoman reaction against it. After expelling the Spaniards in 1529, the Ottomans established a corsair principality. At its height in the 1600s, the city, with perhaps forty thousand inhabitants, held as many as twenty thousand Christians for ransom. In the eighteenth century, Western states forced an end to corsair activities and Algiers began to specialize in grain exports. A dispute over payment for grain deliveries to Napoleon led to the occupation of Algiers by the French (1830).
French army rule gave way to French civilian control in 1871. Both the military and the settlers initially erected their residential and commercial structures in the lower part of the Casbah (qasba, citadel), as the pre-1830 part of Algiers was called. In contrast to other areas of North Africa, no new European city center sprang up outside the existing one.
The end of the nineteenth century was a time of rapid population increase (by 41 percent from 1886 to 1896, and then to a total of 155,000 settlers and 45,000 Muslims by 1918) and considerable commercial wealth, particularly from wine exports. Public building included a central train depot and a new harbor (both completed by 1896), streetcar lines (begun in 1896), and municipal and educational infrastructures (water, gas, hospitals, a university). Ambitious plans to turn the entire lower Casbah into a city with wide boulevards were quashed by the military, but the incorporation of the suburb of Mustapha in 1904 opened the way for a more systematic southern expansion. Regional Algiers was born.
In the new city, the French rejected the Arab architecture of the Casbah for French bourgeois classicism, while the residents of the wealthier suburbs opted for imitations of Turkish gardens (jinan) architecture. After World War I, European monumental classicism took over, and in the 1930s functional modernism began to emerge. Construction of a new waterfront neighborhood pushed the Casbah into the hills, where it was greatly reduced in size. The former corsair city was finally cut off from the sea.
During the interwar period, Muslim agriculture in Algeria reached its productive limits on the less fertile lands that the colonists left for the indigenous population. The capital offered alternative employment in the port, shipyards, mechanical industries, and trucking firms. In addition, there were small-scale construction firms, an industry for the processing of agricultural products, and a large administrative sector. French settlers, however, held most of the skilled jobs. Muslim rural immigrants provided the unskilled labor. They crowded into shantytowns in the hills or into the Casbah, which had twice as many people as it had held in 1830, packed into one-quarter as many buildings.
In 1954, overwhelming agrarian inequality and misery triggered the Algerian War of Independence. The war hastened the rural exodus, and around 1956, for the first time, more Muslims than Europeans lived in Algiers. In 1957, the war extended to the city, where it was fought briefly in the Casbah's maze of cul-de-sacs. In 1962, France's President Charles de Gaulle grew weary of the political divisions the war was creating in France, and Algeria achieved its independence. Furious settlers scorched parts of downtown Algiers before leaving the city en masse (311,000 left between 1960 and 1962).
In a mad rush, many of the 550,000 Muslims in town occupied dwellings vacated by the settlers. The new independent government nationalized the vacated housing stock and introduced rent controls. The colonial pattern of urbanization continued: the central city of mixed business and residential structures; the decaying, overpopulated Casbah; the well-off (uphill) and poorer (downhill) suburbs; and the shantytowns in the hillside ravines. Free-market rents continued in the traditionally Muslim quarters, which were composed of mostly low-grade dwellings. Rural-urban migrants flowed into the shantytowns and slums, creating a total of 1 million inhabitants toward the end of the 1960s.
A state-led industrialization program that lasted from 1971 to 1985 provided Algiers with factories for mechanical and electrical machinery, processed agricultural goods, building materials, textiles, wood, and paper. These attracted new masses of migrants. At first, the government neglected to provide adequate housing for the new workers. Uncontrolled urban sprawl moved into Algiers's rich agricultural belt around the bay. When the population reached nearly 2 million in the early 1980s, the government finally began a program of urban renewal. Plans were made to move squatters to solid housing or back to their villages, to rehabilitate the Casbah, and to build subways and freeways to relieve urban grid-lock.
Low world market prices for oil and gas from 1986 to 1992 triggered a severe financial crisis and brought the renewal program to a halt. The subsequent civil war (1992 - 2001) between the military, in control of the government, and Islamist challengers brought Algiers extortion rackets, bombings, shootouts, and abductions. Villagers fled from even worse carnage in the countryside, swelling the population of Algiers to over three million during the 1990s. At the same time, many middle-class professionals fled abroad, taking with them much of the city's previously flourishing intellectual and artistic culture. The civil war had abated considerably by 2001, but insecurity continued to a degree in the capital and country. Early in the twenty-first century, unemployment in the city was estimated at 35 percent.
Bibliography
Martinez, Luis. The Algerian Civil War, 1990 - 1998, translated by Jonathan Derrick. London: Hurst, 2000.
— PETER VON SIVERS
Capital of Algeria and largest city in the country, located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
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The country code is: 213
The city code is: 2
Local Time: Jul 24, 6:54 AM
| Algiers | |||
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| Nickname: Algiers the | |||
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| Country | Algeria | ||
| Wilaya | Algiers Province | ||
| Re-founded | AD 944 | ||
| Government | |||
| - Wali (Governor) | Mohamed Kebir Addou | ||
| Population (2005) | |||
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| - Urban | |||
| - Metro | |||
| Time zone | CET ([[UTC+1]]) | ||
| Postal codes | 16000-16132 | ||
Algiers (Arabic: الجزائر, Standard Arabic: Al Jaza'ir IPA: [ɛlʤɛˈzɛːʔir], Algerian Arabic: Dzayer ([dzæjer] (From Berber pronunciation), Berber:
Nicknamed El-Bahdja (البهجة) or Alger la Blanche ("Algiers the White") for the glistening white of its buildings as seen rising up from the sea, it is situated on the west side of a bay of the Mediterranean Sea. The city name is derived from the Arabic word al-jazā’ir, which translates as the islands, referring to the four islands which lay off the city's coast until becoming part of the mainland in 1525. Al-jazā’ir is itself a truncated form of the city's older name jazā’ir banī mazghannā, "the islands of (the tribe) Bani Mazghanna", used by early medieval geographers such as al-Idrisi and Yaqut al-Hamawi. Algiers is the only Algerian city with an English name different from its French name.
The modern part of the city is built on the level ground by the seashore and the old part, the ancient city of the deys, climbs the steep hill behind the modern town and is crowned by the casbah or citadel, feet ({{formatnum:{{rnd/+|400*0.3048
|Expression error: unrecognised punctuation character "{"|}}}} m) above the sea. The casbah
and the two quays form a triangle.
A Phoenician commercial outpost called Ikosim, later developed into a small Roman town called Icosium, existed on what is now the marine quarter of the city. The rue de la Marine follows the lines of a Roman street. Roman cemeteries existed near Bab-el-Oued and Bab Azoun. The city was given Latin rights by Vespasian. The bishops of Icosium are mentioned as late as the 5th century.
The present city was founded in 944 by Buluggin ibn Ziri, the founder of the Berber Zirid-Senhaja dynasty, which was overthrown by Roger II of Sicily in 1148. The Zirids had before that date lost Algiers, which in 1159 was occupied by the Almohades, and in the 13th century came under the dominion of the Abd-el-Wadid sultans of Tlemcen.
Nominally part of the sultanate of Tlemcen, Algiers had a large measure of independence under
Algiers, however, continued to be of comparatively little importance until after the expulsion from Spain of the Moors, many of whom sought asylum in the city. In 1510, following their occupation of Oran and other towns on the coast of Africa, the Spaniards fortified the Penon. In 1516, the amir of Algiers, Selim b. Teumi, invited the corsair brothers Aruj and Khair ad-Din Barbarossa to expel the Spaniards. Arouj came to Algiers, caused Selim to be assassinated, and seized the town. Khair ad-Din, succeeding Arouj after the latter was killed in battle against the Spaniards at Tlemcen, was the founder of the pashaluk, afterwards beylik, of Algeria after formally inviting the Sultan to accept sovereignty over the territory and to annex Algiers to the Ottoman Empire.
Algiers from this time became the chief seat of the Barbary pirates. In October 1541, the king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sought to capture the city, but a storm destroyed a great number of his ships, and his army of some 30,000, chiefly Spaniards, was defeated by the Algerians under their Pasha, Hassan. From the 17th century, Algiers, by then only formally part of the Ottoman Empire but essentially free of Ottoman control, sited on the periphery of both the Ottoman and European economic spheres, and depending for its existence on a Mediterranean that was increasingly controlled by European shipping, backed by European navies, turned to piracy and ransoming. Repeated attempts were made by various nations to subdue the pirates that disturbed shipping in the western Mediterranean and engaged in slave raids as far north as Cornwall. The United States fought two wars (the First and Second Barbary Wars) over Algiers' attacks on shipping.
In 1816, the city was bombarded by a British squadron under Lord Exmouth (a descendant of Thomas Pellew, taken in an Algerian slave raid in 1715), assisted by Dutch men-of-war, and the corsair fleet burned. The history of Algiers from 1830 to 1962 is bound to the larger history of Algeria and its relationship to France. On July 4, 1827, on the pretext of an affront to the French consul — whom the dey had hit with a fly-whisk when he said the French government was not prepared to pay its large outstanding debts to two Algerian Jewish merchants — a French army under General de Bourmont attacked the city, which capitulated the following day. Algiers became a French colony.
In 1962, after a bloody independence struggle in which up to 1.5 million Algerians died at the hands of the French Army and the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, Algeria finally gained its independence, with Algiers as its capital. Since then, despite losing its entire European or pied-noir population, the city has expanded massively. It now has about 3 million inhabitants, or 10 percent of Algeria's population — and its suburbs now cover most of the surrounding Metidja plain.
Having hosted the All-Africa Games in 1978, Algiers will again host the games in 2007. Algiers is also the "Capital of Arabic Culture" for 2007.
In August 2007, The Economist magazine ranked Algiers as the least livable city in a survey of 132 cities.
Algiers plays also a decisive part during the War of Algeria (1954-1962), in particular during the Battle of Algiers, during which the 10th Division parachutist of the French Army, from January 7, 1957, led hunting to the Algerian freedom fighters, on order of the Minister of Justice François Mitterrand, which gives him all capacities “to eliminate the insurrectionists”. The city counted 884,000 inhabitants then Algiers remains marked by this episode characterized by a fight without mercy between the freedom fighters resorting to the attacks anti-French and the French Army carrying out a bloody repression including the quasi-systematic use of torture against the protesters of the colonial order, such as the young professor of mathematics Maurice Audin, or the nationalist leader Larbi Ben M'Hidi, honoured since by the municipality: principal arteries of the city bear their names. The manifestations of May 13, 1958 at the time of the crisis of May 1958 devote to it the fall of the Fourth Republic in France, as well as the return of the general de Gaulle to the businesses.
The Algerians celebrated the independence of Algeria on July 5 1962. Directed by the soldiers, Algiers became a member of Non-aligned Movement during the Cold War. In October 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Algiers was the theatre of demonstrations claiming the end of the single party system, true democracy baptized “Spring of Algiers” (see the article: Riots of October 1988 in Algeria ). They were repressed by the authorities (more than 300 dead), but constitute a turning in the political history of modern Algeria. In 1989, a new constitution was adopted that put an end to the reign of the single party and saw the creation of more than fifty political parties, as well as an officially total release of the newspaper industry.
The city becomes then until 1992 the theatre of many political demonstrations of all tendencies. In 1991, a political formation dominated by religious conservatives, it FIS, engages a political iron arm with the authorities which shows élections that it is on the way to gain in 1992, with the favour of a massive abstention from the disillusioned Algerian voters by the turning of the events. The cancellation of the poll by the authorities marks the beginning of a news période of violences opposing the State to the religious ultraconservateurs made up in armed groups, until 1999. The social and cultural economic activity takes again colors with the favour of calms returned and of the ambitions of an avid young population of voyages and adventures.
There are many public buildings of interest, including the whole Kasbah quarter, Martyrs Square (Sahat ech-Chouhada ساحة الشهداء), the government offices (formerly the British consulate), the "Grand", "New", and Ketchaoua Mosques, the Roman Catholic cathedral of Notre Dame d'Afrique, the Bardo Museum (a former Turkish mansion), the old Bibliotheque Nationale d'Alger — a Turkish palace built in 1799–1800 — and the new National Library, built in a style reminiscent of the British Library. The main building in the Kasbah was begun in 1516 on the site of an older building, and served as the palace of the deys until the French conquest. A road has been cut through the centre of the building, the mosque turned into barracks, and the hall of audience allowed to fall into ruin. There still remain a minaret and some marble arches and columns. Traces exist of the vaults in which were stored the treasures of the dey. The Grand Mosque (Jamaa-el-Kebir الجامع الكبير) is traditionally said to be the oldest mosque in Algiers. The pulpit (minbar منبر) bears an inscription showing that the building existed in 1018. The minaret was built by Abu Tachfin, sultan of Tlemcen, in 1324. The interior of the mosque is square and is divided into aisles by columns joined by Moorish arches. The New Mosque (Jamaa-el-Jedid الجامع الجديد), dating from the 17th century, is in the form of a Greek cross, surmounted by a large white cupola, with four small cupolas at the corners. The minaret is feet ({{formatnum:{{rnd/+|90*0.3048
|0|27}}}} m) high. The interior resembles that of the Grand Mosque.
The church of the Holy Trinity (built in 1870) stands at the southern end of the rue d'Isly near the site of the demolished Fort Bab Azoun باب عزون. The interior is richly decorated with various coloured marbles. Many of these marbles contain memorial inscriptions relating to the English residents (voluntary and involuntary) of Algiers from the time of John Tipton, British consul in 1580. One tablet records that in 1631 two Algerine pirate crews landed in Ireland, sacked Baltimore, and carried off its inhabitants to slavery; another recalls the romantic escape of Ida M’Donnell, daughter of Admiral Ulric, consul-general of Denmark, and wife of the British consul. When Lord Exmouth was about to bombard the city in 1816, the British consul was thrown into prison and loaded with chains. Mrs M’Donnell — who was but sixteen — escaped to the British fleet disguised as a midshipman, carrying a basket of vegetables in which her baby was hidden. (Mrs M’Donnell subsequently married the duc de Talleyrand-Perigord and died at Florence in 1880). Among later residents commemorated is Edward Lloyd, who was the first person to show the value of esparto grass for the manufacture of paper, and thus started an industry which is one of the most important in Algeria. The Ketchaoua mosque (Djamaa Ketchaoua جامع كتشاوة), at the foot of the Casbah, was before independence in 1962 the cathedral of St Philippe, itself made in 1845 from a mosque dating from 1612. The principal entrance, reached by a flight of 23 steps, is ornamented with a portico supported by four black-veined marble columns. The roof of the nave is of Moorish plaster work. It rests on a series of arcades supported by white marble columns. Several of these columns belonged to the original mosque. In one of the chapels was a tomb containing the bones of San Geronimo. The building seems a curious blend of Moorish and Byzantine styles.
Algiers possesses a college with schools of law, medicine, science and letters. The college buildings are large and handsome. The Bardo museum holds some of the ancient sculptures and mosaics discovered in Algeria, together with medals and Algerian money. The port of Algiers is sheltered from all winds. There are two harbours, both artificial — the old or northern harbour and the southern or Agha harbour. The northern harbour covers an area of 235 acres (95 ha). An opening in the south jetty affords an entrance into Agha harbour, constructed in Agha Bay. Agha harbour has also an independent entrance on its southern side. The inner harbour was begun in 1518 by Khair-ad-Din Barbarossa (see History, below), who, to accommodated his pirate vessels, caused the island on which was Fort Penon to be connected with the mainland by a mole. The lighthouse which occupies the site of Fort Penon was built in 1544.
Algiers was a walled city from the time of the deys until the close of the 19th century. The French, after their occupation of the city (1830), built a rampart, parapet and ditch, with two terminal forts, Bab Azoun باب عزون to the south and Bab-el-Oued باب الواد to the north. The forts and part of the ramparts were demolished at the beginning of the 20th century, when a line of forts occupying the heights of Bouzareah بوزريعة (at an elevation of feet ({{formatnum:{{rnd/+|1300*0.3048
|0|396}}}} m) above the sea) took their place. Notre-Dame d'Afrique, a church built (1858–1872) in a mixture of the Roman and Byzantine styles, is conspicuously situated, overlooking the sea, on the shoulder of the Bouzareah hills, 2 miles (3.2 km) to the north of the city. Above the altar is a statue of the Virgin depicted as a black woman. The church also contains a solid silver statue of the archangel Michael, belonging to the confraternity of Neapolitan fishermen.
Villa Abd-el-Tif, former residence of the dey, was used during the French period, to accommodate French artists, chiefly painters, and winners of the Abd-el-Tif prize, among whom Maurice Boitel, for a while of two years. Nowadays, Algerian artists are back in the villa's studios.
 The Monument of the Martyrs (Maquam E’chahid) |
Algiers is an important economic, commercial and financial pole, with in particular a stock exchange recording an annual capitalisation of 60 billion euros. The port of Algiers is also the most important of West Africa. Mohamed Ben Ali El Abbar, president of the Council d administration of the emirate group EMAAR, presented five megaprojets to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, during a ceremony which took place Saturday, July 15 with the Palate of the People of Algiers. The projects will transform the city of Algiers and its surroundings, by equipping them with a retail area, and restoration and leisure facilities. The first project will concentrate on the reorganization and the development of the infrastructures of the railway station "Aga ", located in the downtown area. Ultramodern, the station, intended to accommodate more than 80.000 passengers per day, will become a pole of circulation in the heart of the grid system, surrounded by commercial offices and buildings among which hotels intended for the travellers in transit. A shopping centre and three high-rise office buildings rising with the top of the commercial zone will accompany the project. The second project will relate to the bay of Algiers and aims to revitalize the sea front. The development of the 4,4 km sea front will include marinas, channels, luxury hotels, offices, apartments of great standing, luxury stores and leisure amenities. A crescent-shaped peninsula will be set up on the open sea. The project of the bay of Algiers will also comprise six small islands, of which four of round form, connected to each other by bridges and marinas and will include tourist and residential complexes. The third project will relate to restructuring an area of Algiers, qualified by the originators of the project of "city of wellness". El Abbar indicated to the journalists that the complex would be "agréable for all those which will want to combine tourism and wellbeing or tourism and relaxation". The complex will include a university, a research center and a medical centre. It should also include a hospital complex, a care, centre, a hotel zone, an urban centre and a thermal spa with villas and apartments. The university will include a medical school and a school for care male nurses which will be able to accommodate 500 students. The university campus will have the possibility of seeing setting up broad ranges of buildings of research laboratories and residences. Another project relates to technological implantation of a campus in Sidi Abdellah, 25 km south-east from Algiers. This 90 hectares site will include shopping centres, residential zones with high standard apartments and a golf course surrounded by villas and hotels. Two other residential zones, including 1.800 apartments and 40 high standard villas, will be built on the surrounding hills. The fifth project is that of the tourist complex Colonel Abbès, which will be located 25km west from Algiers. This complex will include several retail zones, places of meetings and residential zones composed of apartments and villas enjoying view of the sea.
To some 20 km in the west of Algiers seaside resorts are such as Sidi Fredj (ex-Sidi Ferruch), Palm Beach, Douaouda, Zéralda, the Club of the Pines (residence of State); one will find there complexes tourist, Algerian and different restaurants, souvenir shops, supervised beaches, etc the city is also equipped with important hotel complexes such as the hotel Hilton, El-Aurassi or El Djazair. Algiers also obtained the first watery park of the country. Located at ten minutes of the city while going towards the East, Kiffan Club extends on a surface from 2 hectares. Large adult basin, several basins children as well as large toboggans, the site includes/understands several points of restoration. With dimensions is the Karting Escape, who opened his doors in 2005, with a long track 700 meters and having three categories different of karts. Aquafortland comes to supplement this decoration with a ludic swimming pool spread out over 1,5 hectares, and having all the conveniences necessary for the wellbeing of the customer. The tourism of Algiers be in full rise but be not also develop than that of large city of Morocco or of Tunisia.
Algiers is the largest sporting pole of Algeria. Cash clubs in the whole of the disciplines, and which conquered many national and international titles, it also counts an enormous sporting complex (Complex of OCO - Mohamed Boudiaf), which gathers the Olympic stage of July 5 (of a capacity of places), a stage annexes for athletics, an Olympic swimming pool, a room multisports (the Cupola), a golf 18 holes, and several courts of tennis.
Algiers already accommodated the following sporting events (not-exhaustive list):
Principal clubs of association football of the city (having already evolved/moved in Division 1):
Algiers has sister relationships with a number of cities worldwide:
In addition, many of the wards and cities within Algiers maintain sister-city relationships with other foreign cities.
| World Heritage Sites in Algeria |
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 Al Qal'a of Beni Hammad · Djémila · Kasbah of Algiers · M'Zab Valley · Tassili n'Ajjer · Timgad · Tipasa |
| Capitals of Africa |
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Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire · Abuja, Nigeria · Accra, Ghana · Addis Ababa, Ethiopia · Algiers, Algeria · Antananarivo, Madagascar · Asmara, Eritrea · Bamako, Mali · Bangui, Central African Republic · Banjul, Gambia · Bissau, Guinea-Bissau · Bloemfontein (One of 3), South Africa · Brazzaville, Congo Republic · Bujumbura, Burundi · Cairo, Egypt · Cape Town (One of 3), South Africa · Conakry, Guinea · Cotonou, |
