🇩🇿 Algeria
Algiers
Algiers (Alger in French, El Djazaïr in Arabic — population 3.4 million in the city, 5.5 million in the wider metropolitan area — the capital of Algeria and the largest city in Africa outside of Cairo and Lagos) is one of the most historically layered and visually dramatic capitals in the Mediterranean: the city climbs from the Bay of Algiers (the deep blue crescent bay of the Mediterranean) up steep hills to the Casbah (القصبة — the UNESCO World Heritage old city, the most important Ottoman-era urban fabric surviving in North Africa), its white cubic houses cascading down the hillside in layers visible from ships approaching from the sea (the "White City" — "la Blanche"). Algiers was founded by the Berber city of Icosium in Antiquity, conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century CE, developed by the Zirids (the 10th-century Berber dynasty) and then by the Hafsids and the Zayyanids (the medieval North African dynasties), and transformed into the most powerful pirate city of the Mediterranean under the Barbarossa brothers (Aruj and Khayr ad-Din — the two Barbary corsairs who captured Algiers for the Ottoman Empire in 1516, establishing the Ottoman Regency of Algiers that ruled North Africa for 300 years). The French conquest of 1830 (begun with the pretext of an unpaid debt from the Napoleonic Wars and a fly-whisk slap by the Dey of Algiers to the French consul) began the 132-year French colonial period that left Algiers with the most complete example of French colonial urbanism outside of France: the Boulevard du Télemly (the "Promenade des Anglais" of Algiers), the French-built port district (the Basse-Casbah, now the BARDO museum quarter), the French Cathedral (Notre-Dame d'Afrique) and the Jardin d'Essai (the colonial botanical garden). The independence War (1954–1962) and the "Battle of Algiers" (1956–1957 — the urban guerrilla war inside the Casbah that was the model for every subsequent urban insurgency and the subject of the Gillo Pontecorvo film (1966)) shaped the modern identity of the city.