Algiers wears its layers in public: Ottoman sea-wall palaces, style arabisant façades from the French decades, and a modernist painting tradition — Baya, Issiakhem, Racim — kept in museums few visitors reach. Three days of galleries, theatres and neighbourhood arts.
Africa's largest fine-art collection: some 8,000 works across five floors, from Delacroix and Renoir to Algerian modernists Baya, Issiakhem and Racim's miniatures. Open Sat–Thu 10:00–17:00, closed Friday.
Jonnart and Tondoire's 1910 neo-Moorish post office is the manifesto of style arabisant: horseshoe arches, zellige tiling and carved plaster vaulting over the hall. Still a working post office — walk in and look up.
The national modern art museum occupies Henri Petit's 1901 Galeries de France department store on Rue Larbi Ben M'hidi: a neo-Moorish atrium under a glass roof, now three floors of Algerian and pan-African shows.
Three 16th–18th-century Ottoman palaces and fishermen's houses built into the sea wall below the Casbah, restored as a centre for arts and heritage: painted cedar ceilings, tiled courtyards and rotating exhibitions.
An 1879 Moorish villa built by a Tunisian exile, now the national museum of prehistory and ethnography: Saharan rock-art casts, Tuareg and Kabyle silver, and Ahaggar tents set in a walled garden of palms.
The 1960s state bookshop on Place Émir Abdelkader is still the city's literary anchor: Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar and Mouloud Feraoun in French and Arabic, plus Algerian art monographs you will not find abroad.
Algeria's oldest museum (1838), in the Parc de la Liberté, splits in two: Roman bronzes and mosaics from Cherchell, Timgad and Djemila in one wing, Islamic ceramics, manuscripts and Ottoman marble in the other.
The 1853 Italian-style opera house on Place Port Saïd is Algeria's national stage: Arabic and Kabyle drama, the Ballet National Algérien and Andalusian recitals under a gilded horseshoe of boxes. Tickets from 300 DA.
A 1980s marble-and-mashrabiya complex above El Madania housing the Galerie Baya, a manuscript collection and free contemporary exhibitions; it also hosts SILA book-fair events and Andalusian music evenings.
Rue Didouche Mourad climbs from the Grande Poste past 1930s arcades to the Sacré-Cœur. Halfway up, the covered Clauzel market sells cardoons, olives and hot m'hadjeb from tiled 19th-century stalls.
The brutalist complex beneath the Martyrs' Memorial holds the Salle Ibn Zeydoun theatre, artist studios and a run of small galleries and record shops — the closest thing Algiers has to a single arts campus.
Bab El Oued's Trois Horloges square is the working-class engine room of Algerian popular culture: chaâbi and raï cassettes, football arguments and karantika stalls under the 1930s clock tower, Bologhine's seafront below.