Algeria historical timeline

Algeria is the largest country in Africa and one of the least visited relative to what it holds, and both facts have the same explanation: a long colonial occupation, a war to end it, and a closed period afterwards. The layers a traveller meets are Roman, Ottoman, French and Algerian, in that order and often on the same street -- a Haussmann-style boulevard running out of an Ottoman casbah, with a Roman town an hour inland.

Chronology

1. c. 10,000 B.P. The rock art of the Tassili n'Ajjer is painted. The vast majority of it dates to the ninth and tenth millennia before present or younger, and it records elephants, giraffe and herded cattle in what is now hyper-arid desert -- the clearest evidence anywhere of a green Sahara, and the reason the plateau is a national park and a Biosphere Reserve.
2. 100 Timgad is founded by the Emperor Trajan, who named it for his mother, sister and father. Its grid survives almost complete -- it is nicknamed the Pompeii of North Africa -- and it is the clearest Roman town plan a visitor can walk anywhere on the continent.
3. 944 The Zirids found the Casbah of Algiers, the old medina above the bay. It is the oldest continuously inhabited quarter in the country and the layer the French city was later built below and around, which is why the two are stacked so visibly on the same hillside.
4. 1012 The first of the five hilltop villages of the M'Zab valley is founded, and the group -- Ghardaïa, Melika, Beni Isguen, Bou Noura and El Atteuf -- is built to identical planning concepts almost a thousand years ago. They are a Saharan urban form -- fortified hilltop towns with their palm groves below -- built to a plan that has not changed since, and still lived in.
5. 1516 The Regency of Algiers is founded by the privateer brothers Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa, a semi-independent Ottoman province on the Barbary Coast that lasted until 1830. The Ottoman palaces, mosques and fortifications inside the Casbah are its work, and the regency is what France invaded rather than a Berber kingdom.
6. 1830 France invades, annexes the territory in 1848, and extends control only after decades of resistance. Annexation rather than protectorate is the detail that matters: Algeria was administered as part of France, which is why its northern cities have French street plans, French civic architecture and a rail network built to French standards.
7. 1942 Operation Torch lands Allied forces in French North Africa from 8 to 16 November, the first large American action against Germany and Italy. Algiers became the effective capital of Free France for the rest of the war, which is a substantial part of why the city's colonial-era administrative quarter is built at the scale it is.
8. 1954 The Algerian War begins on 1 November and runs to 19 March 1962. It is the event modern Algeria is organised around -- the national holiday, the monuments, the street names -- and the martyrs' memorial above Algiers is the single most visited site in the country for that reason.
9. 1962 Independence is declared on 5 July. Through that summer and the following year some 1.4 million people left for France, including almost the entire Jewish community, which emptied and then refilled the cities a visitor now walks through.
10. 1967 The last French forces leave the naval base at Mers El Kébir. The Evian Accords had allowed a military presence for fifteen years, so the withdrawal came significantly early -- and it marks the point at which the country's coast became entirely its own.
11. 1982 Djémila, Timgad, Tassili n'Ajjer and the M'zab valley are all inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in a single year. That list is effectively Algeria's tourism map: it is why those places have protection, signage and an access regime, and why a visitor's itinerary tends to follow them rather than anything else.
12. 1992 The Algerian Civil War begins on 11 January after the military intervenes against an Islamist electoral victory, and runs to 2002; President Bouteflika spoke in 2005 of a round figure of 150,000 killed. It is the decade that emptied Algeria of visitors, and the reason its infrastructure for them is still thin thirty years later.
13. 1992 The Casbah of Algiers is listed as a World Heritage Site. Listing has not stopped its structural decline -- it is one of the more fragile inhabited World Heritage sites anywhere -- and a visit today is as much about a quarter under repair as about a preserved one.

What survived, and what did not

What survived best is what nobody had a reason to remove. Algeria holds some of the finest Roman towns anywhere -- Timgad and Djemila above all, both UNESCO-listed -- and they are in good condition precisely because the interior was thinly settled and the sites were not quarried for a growing city. The same logic protects the M'zab valley in the south and the rock art of the Tassili n'Ajjer: remoteness did the work that heritage legislation does elsewhere.

The cities are the more complicated story. The casbah of Algiers survives as a dense Ottoman quarter inside a French colonial city, UNESCO-listed and structurally fragile, and the boulevards below it are the colonial layer built over what was cleared. Both are worth seeing for what they say about each other. The gap in the record is the twentieth century after 1962: the closed decades and the conflict of the 1990s left little visitor infrastructure, which is why a country with this density of first-rank sites still receives so few people -- and why the sites are as empty as they are.