Algeria: Rome Meets the Sahara

Algeria’s diverse eastern landscapes range from coastal panoramas set against the backdrop of the Mediterranean, through the beautiful mountainous hinterland, to the Sahara desert.

The variety of ancient sites and monuments encompasses ruined cities and traces of the desert frontier of the Roman Empire, medieval oasis towns and the Ottoman and French colonial architecture of the coastal region. 

We will begin our exploration of ‘Alger la Blanche’ with its labyrinthine Casbah and Ottoman palaces, before flying eastwards to Annaba, where the evocative ruins of Hippo Regius include the cathedral church in which St Augustine once held forth. We will stay in Constantine, the ‘City of Bridges’, and visit the nearby sites of Tiddis and Djémila; while to the south, we will take in the huge military base of Lambaesis and the Roman colony of Timgad.

After a southward excursion through the Aurès Mountains to seek out traces of the Roman desert frontier in the vicinity of Biskra, we will return towards Constantine in order to fly south to Ghardaïa in the picturesque M’Zab valley: this is a remote region, to which people have often fled to avoid population movements on the coast. Our tour will end on the coast again, with a visit to the town of Cherchell, once a glittering royal capital.

Algeria is still finding its feet after the bitter experience of its own ‘Arab Spring’ in the 1990s. Since early 2019 it has also been feeling its way towards a new relationship between the people and their rulers, but with exemplary restraint on all sides. Over ten years of ACE tours to Algeria, we have had no anxieties about visiting this wonderful country.

The standard of hotels and service rarely matches the levels that we expect in Western Europe, but the warmth of the welcome is genuine, and we are confident that you will find the tour a rewarding introduction to this dynamic yet little known country.

This tour will be led by Philip Kenrick, MA, DPhil, an archaeologist who has worked in Libya at Leptis Magna, Benghazi and Cyrene, and produced a major volume on Sabratha. He has also worked on excavations near Agrigento in Sicily, and on other sites in Italy, Turkey and Jordan. He co-authored the 2019 book Classical Antiquities of Algeria: A Selective Guide.