A history of the wilaya of Algiers: the city and the coast

Icosium and the Casbah

UNESCO describes the first settlement as a Carthaginian trading post of the 4th century BC, on the islands facing the coast. The ancient town was named Icosium, and the Casbah was founded on its ruins in the 10th century.

In the 16th century Algiers came under Ottoman rule, and the Casbah reached its peak in that period. From the late 16th century, the Ottomans gave the old town its present form.

The central communes

In 1832 the Hôpital du Dey, a military hospital also called Maillot, opened in Bab El Oued, partly in a villa built by Hassan Pasha. In 1833 it became a military teaching hospital.

Mustapha, today Sidi M'Hamed, was attached to the commune of Algiers in 1848 and became a separate commune again in 1871. In 1904 it was attached to Algiers once more, this time permanently.

In 1832 a village was built at Kouba for settler families, the first of them from Germany. In the first years of French rule, the area of Hussein Dey was placed under the commune of Kouba. An imperial decree of 20 May 1870 made Hussein Dey a separate commune.

Pointe Pescade, in Raïs Hamidou, was once called Mers ed Debban, and foreign ships waited there for permission to continue to Algiers. In Ottoman times the point formed part of the defences of Algiers, with an old fort and a battery.

Under French rule, Pointe Pescade belonged to the commune of Saint-Eugène. Decree 85-04 of 12 January 1985 listed Raïs Hamidou among the 15 communes of the Ville d'Alger, the city of Algiers.

Pope Leo XIV visited Algeria on 13 and 14 April 2026, the first visit of a pope to the country. On 13 April 2026 he met the Algerian community in Notre-Dame d'Afrique, in Bologhine, and gave an address.

The eastern coast

From the 1830s, emigrants from Port Mahon, on Minorca, settled on the land of Fort-de-l'Eau, today Bordj El Kiffan. Each family received a small farm with oxen and mules.

Fort-de-l'Eau has been described as "a little Mahon", where Catalan and island customs lasted for generations. Fort-de-l'Eau was also a prized seaside resort in the colonial period.

The village of Aïn Taya was founded in 1853 on land once called La Rassauta. A decree of 30 September 1853 created it. Its first settlers, Mahonnais from the Balearic Islands, cleared more than 60 hectares and built about 30 houses within eight months.

Later, Aïn Taya grew from a farming village into a busy seaside resort, with villas, blocks of flats and hotel restaurants. Surcouf and Suffren are old seaside hamlets of the commune, and Suffren began as an annex called Ain Beida.

The western coast

A founding decree of 19 April 1845 created the village of Guyotville, today Aïn Benian, as one of the new colonial settlements west of Algiers. It became a full commune on 28 November 1874.

Many of its early settlers were Spanish or Italian. The Italians came mainly from the Naples area, Calabria, Sicily and, above all, the island of Ustica.

Chéragas was founded as a colonial farming village in the early 1840s and became a full commune in 1856. Many of its first settlers came from Grasse, in France, and the village grew scented plants for perfume and distilled them. It also had works making vegetable horsehair, a plant fibre.

In 1843 Trappist monks from the abbey of Aiguebelle, members of a Catholic religious order, settled on the Staoueli plain. The monks laid the first stone of their monastery in September 1843, and its church was blessed on 22 May 1845. They grew vines and geranium for perfume.

Their farming abbey, the Trappe of Staoueli, was active until 1904, when the community left Algeria. The estate passed to the Algerian state in 1963.

The colonial village of Zéralda was founded on 13 September 1844. Its plan, shaped like a trapezium, placed town lots and gardens around a public square. Zéralda depended in turn on Kolea, on Chéraga from 1860 and on Staoueli, until it became a commune in its own right in 1905.