Algeria Geography, Climate & Nature

Algeria is Africa's largest country by area, and its geography splits sharply into three bands running roughly east to west. A narrow, fertile Mediterranean coastal strip in the north holds most of the population and major cities, including Algiers and Oran.

South of the coast, the Tell Atlas and Saharan Atlas mountain ranges rise across the country, enclosing a semi-arid plateau region between them known as the High Plateaus.

South of the mountains, the Sahara Desert covers roughly four-fifths of Algeria's total area -- a landscape that ranges from the rocky plateaus and dramatic sandstone formations of Tassili n'Ajjer in the far southeast to the sweeping dune fields more commonly pictured as "the Sahara."

Algeria's highest point, Mount Tahat, rises in the Hoggar Mountains deep in the southern desert, a volcanic range far removed from the country's northern population centers.

Algeria's climate mirrors its geography, shifting from Mediterranean in the north to true desert in the south.

The northern coast has a classic Mediterranean climate, with hot, dry summers and mild, wetter winters -- broadly similar to southern Europe just across the sea.

The High Plateaus and mountain regions have a more continental climate, with hotter summers and genuinely cold winters, including regular snowfall at higher elevations.

The Sahara itself has an extreme desert climate -- scorching daytime heat for most of the year, paired with a dramatic day-to-night temperature swing, since desert sand and air hold almost none of the day's heat once the sun sets.

Algeria contains two almost unrelated biological worlds separated by the Atlas mountains. North of them is Mediterranean: cork and holm oak forest, Atlas cedar at altitude, maquis scrub and a coastline of wetlands and lagoons that are important on the African-Eurasian flyway. South of them is one of the driest places on earth, where life is organised entirely around water -- oases, wadis that flow once in years, and the relict species that hold on in the high massifs.

The Saharan massifs are the interesting case. The Hoggar and the Tassili n'Ajjer are high enough to be cooler and wetter than the desert around them, and they shelter species left behind when the Sahara dried: a scatter of Mediterranean cypress and olive surviving thousands of kilometres from their range. The rock art of the Tassili shows the same story from the other end -- elephants, giraffe and cattle painted where none could now live.

The pressures in the north are the familiar Mediterranean ones of clearance, fire and coastal development; in the south the issue is water extraction, since an oasis is a finite aquifer with a settlement attached.

Northern Algerian wildlife is Mediterranean and includes the Barbary macaque, the only macaque in Africa and the only primate north of the Sahara, which survives in the cedar and oak forests of the Atlas. Wild boar, jackal, red fox, genet and the Barbary stag share those forests, and the coastal wetlands hold substantial wintering and passage waterbird numbers.

The Sahara holds the animals that make the desert remarkable rather than empty: fennec fox, dorcas gazelle, desert monitor, horned viper, and in the remotest massifs a handful of Saharan cheetah, one of the rarest large carnivores on earth. None of these is encountered casually -- desert wildlife is nocturnal, dispersed and shy, and the realistic sighting is tracks rather than the animal.

The losses are worth naming because they are recent. Lion, ostrich and addax were all present within historical memory and are gone from the country or nearly so, and the Tassili rock art is the record of a Sahara that supported animals no part of it could support now.