Phoenician traders had a trading post at Arzew, which later became the harbour of Roman Portus Magnus and an Almohad port in the 12th century. Romans also founded a port at Marsat El Hadjadj, Portus Paulus, in a natural harbour protected by two rocky points.
Ancient ports
Phoenician traders had a trading post at Arzew, which later became the harbour of Roman Portus Magnus and an Almohad port in the 12th century. Romans also founded a port at Marsat El Hadjadj, Portus Paulus, in a natural harbour protected by two rocky points.
In the 12th century Mers El Kébir was a naval arsenal of the Almohads. In the 15th century it was under the rulers of Tlemcen.
The city of Oran
Andalusian sailors founded Oran as a trading port in 902 or 903. Spain held Oran from 1509 to 1708 and again from 1732. The Spanish, the Portuguese and the Ottomans also contested the port of Mers El Kébir, until France took control in 1830.
Oran later became the seat of the Beylik of the West, an Ottoman province, and French troops entered it on 4 January 1831. Emir Abdelkader held Arzew in 1831, and French troops occupied it on 3 July 1833.
Andalusian farmers
Local histories say that Andalusian Moors expelled from Spain settled on the plain of Bousfer and on the shore of El Ançor. They brought irrigated farming.
Colonial villages
The colonial village of Misserghin was founded in November 1844, with 175 inhabitants. Around 1850 an orphanage opened there, with a nursery and a school of horticulture, and a spring in a cave known as the Grotto of the Virgin supplied the settlement with water. Boufatis, then Saint-Louis, was created as a colonisation centre in the 1840s, with a church beside the town hall square.
Many villages began as agricultural colonies of 1848: Ben Freha, El Braya, Gdyel, Hassi Ben Okba, Hassi Bounif and Sidi Benyebka. The first settlers of Gdyel left Paris on 8 October 1848, and those of Hassi Ben Okba and Sidi Benyebka, largely from Paris, arrived in November 1848. Hassi Mefsoukh began in late October 1848 as an annex of the new colony of Saint-Cloud, now Gdyel, and about forty families from Paris settled there.
A royal ordinance of February 1848 confirmed the village of Valmy, now El Kerma, laid out for 52 households on 500 ha. Settlers came to Boutlelis in the early 1850s, mostly from eastern France. A settlement was created at Aïn El Turk by decree of 11 August 1850, and a colonial settlement of about 50 families was created at Bousfer in 1850.
Several villages became full communes: Arzew and Valmy on 31 December 1856, Aïn El Turk on 23 March 1864, Hassi Bounif on 22 September 1870 and Ben Freha in 1885. El Ançor followed on 14 April 1892. The colonial village of Marsat El Hadjadj was built from 1883 and became a full commune in 1922.
Gdyel planted vines from 1862, El Kerma made them its main crop from about 1880, and Bousfer became the wine growing centre of the area. Aïn El Turk first lived from vines and market gardens, and tourism grew strongly there from the 1990s.
An entrepreneur from Florence worked the marble quarries in the hills above Sidi Benyebka from 1840. Its marble was used in the balustrades of the grand staircase of the Palais Garnier, the opera house of Paris.
The 2022 Mediterranean Games
In summer 2022 Oran hosted the 19th Mediterranean Games, with 26 countries taking part. The sports hall of Aïn El Turk was one of the two venues of the women's handball tournament.
Belgaid, a neighbourhood of Bir El Djir, was developed for the Games, and its athletes' village opened on 23 June 2022. The former village passed to the wilaya in 2023. Since then it has hosted sports teams, summer holidaymakers and events such as the Printemps d'Oran festival of crafts and cooking.
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