Algiers stacks 2,000 years on one hillside: Roman Icosium under the lower Casbah, Ottoman palaces of the deys, French colonial boulevards, and the alleys where the 1954–62 war was fought house by house. This is that story, walked.
Algeria's oldest museum (1897) holds the Roman Icosium finds, Punic stelae, the Berber and Numidian collections, and a superb Islamic wing of Ottoman ceramics, arms and manuscripts. Two wings, split antiquity/Islamic art. Closed Fridays.
The oldest mosque in Algiers, built in 1097 by the Almoravid sultan Yusuf ibn Tashfin — horseshoe arches, a minbar dated 1097, and a minaret added in 1332 by the Ziyanid sultan of Tlemcen. Its arcaded gallery on Place des Martyrs is Ottoman.
Three 16th–18th-century Ottoman palaces and six fishermen's houses fused into the sea wall — the last surviving stretch of the lower Casbah after French demolition. Painted ceilings, marble courtyards, and the dey-era corsair captains' quarters.
The Ottoman jetty built by Khayr al-Din Barbarossa after his 1529 capture of the Spanish Peñón fort — its stones were recycled straight into this mole, which welded the offshore islets to the mainland and created the corsair harbour.
The war museum under the Martyrs' Memorial: FLN weapons, the guillotine used at Barberousse prison, torture-centre reconstructions, and personal effects of Larbi Ben M'hidi and Ali la Pointe. Captions in Arabic and French.
Once Place du Gouvernement, where the French landed their administration in 1830 and razed the lower Casbah. Metro construction from 2009 exposed Roman Icosium streets, a Byzantine basilica and Ottoman housing — preserved in situ under the square.
An 18th-century Ottoman villa built by a Tunisian exile, later a French colonial residence, now the prehistory and ethnography museum: Tassili rock-art casts, Saharan Neolithic tools, and Tuareg and Kabyle material culture in Moorish courtyards.
Consecrated 1872 after 14 years of building, the Romano-Byzantine basilica carries the apse inscription 'Notre Dame d'Afrique priez pour nous et pour les Musulmans' — the reason locals of every faith protected it through the 1990s.
Start at the Ottoman citadel gate and descend through Souk El Djemaa. Dar Hassan Pacha (1791), the dey's palace turned French governor's winter residence, and Dar Aziza on Place des Martyrs show the courtyard-and-gallery house type at its richest.
The house where Ali Amar, Hassiba Ben Bouali, Petit Omar and Mahmoud Bouhamidi were killed on 8 October 1957 when French paratroopers dynamited their hideout behind a false wall. The blast-scarred façade is preserved as a memorial.
Built 1612, converted into the Cathedral of St Philippe in 1832 by the French, returned to Islam at independence in 1962 — the single building that carries the whole colonial argument. Reopened in 2018 after Turkish-funded restoration.
The colonial-era shopping street ends at the Milk Bar, bombed by Zohra Drif on 30 September 1956 in the act that opened the Battle of Algiers. It still serves coffee and ice cream to office workers who mostly no longer notice.