Travel in Algeria: a country visited mostly by its own emigrants

Who actually visits Algeria

The ministry's count for 2023 was 3.3 million foreign tourists, and more than a third of them, about 1.2 million, were members of the diaspora visiting relatives. That diaspora is large. France alone has reportedly over 1.7 million Algerians up to the second generation, the legacy of migration that began with the First World War and grew after 1947, when Algerians gained the right to work in France without further formalities.

The earlier figure is of the same order. The World Tourism Organization counted 2.7 million foreign visitors in 2013. Algeria has been a member of that organisation since 1976, and a figure published by Statista and cited by Reuters puts tourism and travel employment at 543,500 jobs in 2021.

Why the numbers have stayed modest is a matter of history as much as geography. Reuters, reporting on the International Tourism and Travel Fair in Algiers in 2024, noted that governments lost interest in mass tourism as oil and gas revenue grew in the 1960s and 1970s, and that the strife of the 1990s pushed the country further away from the tourist circuit. Analysts it quoted named a rigid visa system and poor transport links as the obstacles now. Britannica records that tourism has traditionally been a minute part of the service sector and that even that share fell from the 1990s.

The state's plans are large, and they follow earlier ones. Wikipedia records a tourism development strategy in force since 2004, under which many modern hotels were built, and a plan called Horizon 2025 launched at a national conference, with foreign investors, mainly French, aiming chiefly at business travellers. The National Tourism Office set a target of 12 million visitors by 2030, a fourfold increase. The ministry said in 2024 that about 2,000 tourism projects had been approved, 800 of them under construction, and that 249 historical sites had been earmarked for tourism, with about 70 prepared and restoration planned for 50 more. A 2030 Master Plan for Tourism Development sets the strategy. At the Algiers tourism fair of 2010 a representative of the World Tourism Organization pointed to the country's "Mediterranean beaches, its fascinating Djurdjura National Park, its human, cultural and historical treasures", and Wikipedia records that by the end of 2010 only 10% of tourist establishments had joined an earlier quality programme.

How the coast and the Tell are travelled

Almost everything a first visit covers lies in the northern strip, where most Algerians live, and the transport follows the coast. The main railway runs parallel to the sea from the Moroccan to the Tunisian border, with fast and frequent services linking Oran, Algiers and Constantine since the late twentieth century; branch lines reach the ports and a few narrow-gauge lines climb onto the High Plateaus. The East-West Highway, completed in 2023, runs 1,216 km from Annaba in the east to Tlemcen in the west. Intercity buses, run by a state company and several private ones, fill the gaps.

The capital's metro opened in 2011 with 9 km and 10 stations, and the Casbah, the Ottoman city on the hill above the port, has been a World Heritage site since 1992. Tipasa, on the coast, was a Phoenician and then a Roman town. Djémila and Timgad are Roman ruins, and Constantine was the Numidian capital Cirta. Tlemcen in the west keeps a Great Mosque first built in 1082 and rebuilt in 1136, and Reuters photographed visitors in the Beni Add caves nearby in May 2024.

The mountains begin close behind the coast. Great Kabylia, east of Algiers, is known for its hilltop villages, and only the valley of the Wadi Soummam gives a route through its ranges to the port of Béjaïa. The northern national parks include Djurdjura, Gouraya, Taza, Chréa, El Kala and Tlemcen, and the Hammadid ruins of Al Qal'a of Beni Hammad complete the northern World Heritage sites.

Which roads cross the Sahara

South of the Saharan Atlas distances change scale. The Ahaggar massif lies about 1,500 km south of Algiers, beside Tamanrasset. Two trans-Saharan roads were built from El-Goléa: one paved route south to Tamanrasset and on to Niger, the other through Adrar to Mali. The Trans-Sahara Highway, now fully paved, links six countries, Algeria, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Tunisia, and the Cairo to Dakar and Algiers to Lagos routes also pass through.

Air Algérie flies daily between the main cities and towns. Britannica lists international airports at Algiers, Annaba, Constantine, Oran, Tlemcen and Ghardaïa, the last in the M'zab, a limestone valley with a large urbanised oasis settled by the Ibadi community after 909 and inscribed by UNESCO in 1982.

The northern edge of the desert is a line of oases. Biskra, Laghouat and Béchar draw on water running off the southern slopes of the Saharan Atlas. Around Ghardaïa in the M'zab live about 290,000 Ibadis. Farther south-west, the oases of Touat and Tidikelt keep the foggara irrigation system and its water measurers, or water bailiffs, whose knowledge UNESCO placed on its urgent safeguarding list in 2018. The Gourara oases keep the Ahellil song and the annual Sbuâ pilgrimage, and Djanet the Sebeïba ceremonies, all on UNESCO's lists.

The deep south has two poles for visitors. Tamanrasset sits under the Ahaggar, and Djanet under the Tassili n'Ajjer, the sandstone plateau of about 72,000 km² with some 15,000 rock engravings and paintings. Both are oases where many Tuareg now live settled lives. Reuters describes the draw in the terms visitors use: nights on the dunes and camel travel with Tuareg guides. The ergs, Britannica stresses, cover only about a quarter of the Algerian Sahara, and much of any desert route crosses bare rock plateau.

What the Tassili rock art records

The Tassili n'Ajjer, whose name translates as plateau of rivers, is a sandstone range of more than 72,000 km² on the borders of Libya and Niger, with Djanet on its south-eastern edge and Illizi on its northern one. Its highest point, Adrar Afao, reaches 2,158 m. Desert varnish colours the rock from near-black to dull red, erosion has cut nearly 300 natural arches in the south-east, and the north keeps deep gorges and permanent pools. It is a national park and a biosphere reserve, and relict woods of Saharan cypress and Saharan myrtle grow on its higher eastern half.

The rock art was first reported in 1910 and became widely known through the sketches of French officers in the 1930s. The archaeologist Henri Lhote, who returned on expeditions between 1956 and 1970, has been heavily criticised: his team is accused of faking images and of damaging paintings by brightening them for tracing and photography. Archaeologists divide the art into five successive traditions, whose dates are still being revised:

The sequence is a record of the Sahara drying: wild game gives way to herds, then to the horse and finally to the camel as the desert closed.

When the seasons suit each zone

The coast has a Mediterranean climate of warm, dry summers and mild, rainy winters. Algiers averages afternoon highs of about 28 °C in July and daytime temperatures of 9 to 15 °C in January, and four-fifths of its rain falls between October and March. The east is wetter than the west throughout: Great Kabylia, Little Kabylia and the Edough massif receive about 1,000 mm a year, while the plains around Oran get less than 580 mm. Wikipedia's geography article gives summer averages of 30 to 43 °C across the Tell and winter averages of 10 to 12 °C, and notes that winter humidity is high and houses are seldom adequately heated, so a coastal winter feels colder indoors than the figures suggest.

Inland the range widens. The High Plateaus have hot summers with afternoons typically above 38 °C and winters that fall to about minus 2 °C at night, and in summer the sirocco can carry dust off the desert as far as the coast. In the Sahara midday heat is possible in any month, but the clear air cools quickly after sunset and nights are cool or cold. Rain is so irregular that years can pass without it.

What the World Heritage sites hold

Algeria ratified the World Heritage Convention on 24 June 1974 and has seven inscribed properties, six cultural and one mixed.

Twelve more sites are on the tentative list, among them the national parks of Djurdjura and El Kala, the royal mausoleums of ancient Algeria and the Augustinian routes, all added in 2025. Algeria: history covers the periods these sites come from.

Which mosques and churches mark the cities

The religious buildings of the northern cities carry the country's layers of rule. In Algiers the Djama'a al-Djedid, the New Mosque, was built in 1660 in the Hanafi tradition of the Ottoman garrison; the Ketchaoua Mosque stands on the first of the Casbah's steep stairways and mixes Moorish and Byzantine forms; and the Catholic basilica of Notre-Dame d'Afrique, in a Neo-Byzantine style, was inaugurated in 1872. The Djamaâ El Djazaïr, the Mosque of Algeria, stands at Mohammedia.

Elsewhere the same layering repeats. The Great Mosque of Tlemcen dates from 1082 and was reconstructed in 1136 under the Almoravids, with a minaret added by the founder of the Zayyanid dynasty in the thirteenth century. At Annaba the Basilica of Saint Augustine, finished in 1900 and dedicated in 1914, stands near the remains of the church where Augustine died. In Oran the Abdallah Ibn Salam Mosque was built as the city's Great Synagogue, begun in 1880 and inaugurated in 1918, before the Jewish community left in 1962. In Batna the Great Mosque named for 1 November 1954 has been open since 2003.

Those arriving by sea land at Algiers, Oran, Annaba or Béjaïa, among the ports Britannica lists with Bettioua, Mostaganem and Ténès; Arzew and Skikda handle mainly oil and gas. The Algerian National Navigation Company runs a fleet of more than 150 vessels.

What visitors are expected to observe

Islam is the state religion, and most Algerians follow Islamic dress codes. Foreign visitors are expected to dress modestly; for women that means covering shoulders, knees and chest. Greetings tend to be long, with questions about health, family and work, and some men avoid prolonged eye contact with women and personal questions. The calendar is marked by Ramadan, the two Eids and the Prophet's birthday, alongside Independence Day on 5 July.

Traffic drives on the right, and mains power is 230 volts on European two-pin plugs. Communications have been slow to spread: Britannica notes limited home internet and the popularity of cybercafés. French, without official status, is widely used in government and the media beside Arabic, and Tamazight is taught in Kabylia.

The state also watches who comes. Freedom House notes that the authorities closely monitor and limit visas for non-Algerians, and that police limit the movement of sub-Saharan migrants towards the coast. Algeria cut diplomatic ties with Morocco in August 2021.