Algiers: the Casbah above the bay

The Casbah, grown from the remains of the Phoenician and Roman city of Icosium, preserves multi-story Ottoman houses with hidden interior courtyards behind anonymous facades, following an urban logic designed to protect family privacy.

The Great Mosque of Algiers, among the oldest in North Africa dating from the eleventh century, preserves a minaret added centuries later by the Zayyanid sultans.

Notre-Dame d'Afrique, a Catholic basilica built in the nineteenth century on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Mediterranean, bears on the apse the inscription 'Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and for the Muslims', conceived as a gesture of interreligious dialogue.

The Maqam Echahid, a cement monument in the shape of three palms meeting at the apex, commemorates since 1982 the fallen of the Algerian war of independence and is visible from much of the city.

The inscription on the apse of Notre-Dame d'Afrique, explicitly addressed to the city's Muslims as well, remains a rare gesture in a religious building constructed at the height of the colonial era.

The Maqam Echahid, erected two decades after independence, overlooks that same basilica from atop its hill today, two monuments that tell of opposite epochs of the same city.