city, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Algeria and administrative center of the department of Algiers. Population, 943,100 (with suburbs; 1966 census). Algiers is a large port on the Mediterranean Sea with a freight turnover of 4.7 million tons, including imports of 3.1 million tons in 1965. A highway and railroad junction, it has the international airport Dar el Beida. It is the country’s chief economic and cultural center. Most highly developed are the metalworking industry, including automobile assembly and agricultural machine building, and the food processing (wine, oil and butter, tobacco, and flour), chemical, petroleum refining, cement, pulp and paper, and textile industries. The city has a university, the National Library, and museums of fine arts, antiquities, ethnology, and African arts.
Algiers was founded in the tenth century on the ruins of the small Roman port Icosium. Through the early 16th century, the city was successively part of the Fatimid, Al-moravid, Almohad, and Ziyanid states. In the 16th century it became the center of the north African state established by Khair-ed-Din Barbarossa, which was nominally dependent on the Ottoman Empire. In 1830 the French conquered Algiers, turning it into the administrative center for the colony of Algeria. During World War II (1939–45), Algiers was the headquarters of the Allied command of the Mediterranean Sea. During the national democratic revolution in Algeria, Algiers was one of the centers of the underground patriotic movement. Since 1962, Algiers has been the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Algeria.
The city is shaped like an amphitheater on the western shore of the Bay of Algiers at the foot of and on the slopes of hills. It has many gardens and parks. Among the monuments which have survived are the Casbah (from Turkish times), the Great Mosque (1096) with its minaret (1323), the mosque and tomb Sidi Abd-el-Rahman (1611), the mosque Djami-al-Djedid (or the Fishermen’s Mosque, 1660), and others. In the new, Èuropean-type city, which expanded mainly to the south of the old city, are the Government House (1930; architects, J. Guiochen and the Perret brothers) and the 22–story residential building Aero Habitat (P. Bourlier, L. Miguel, and others), the 75–m-high residential building Lafayette House (M. Solivères and A. Cazalet), and the Radio and Television Building (P. Tournon and M. Joli)—all from the 1950’s. Construction of new housing blocks has been in progress since 1962.