Photos

Nobody has posted any photographs to TrekEarth of the whole of the city of Algiers yet. Robert Calve did post an old photograph from 1978 of the port area last year, but that’s all there is in the Algeria gallery. So to give you an idea of what the city looks like, I decided I would finish my few postings from Algiers with a shot of the city that I took from the Bouzareah hills north-west of the city.

Algiers is nicknamed El-Bahdja in Arabic or Alger la Blanche in French (‘Algiers the White’) because its buildings are predominately white in colour. The city is situated on the western side of a large bay, roughly in the middle of its northern coastline on the Mediterranean Sea.

Algiers’ Kasbah, which sits on the hill over looking the port, is a listed World Heritage site. The UNESCO website describes it as follows:

“The Kasbah is a unique kind of medina, or Islamic city. It stands in one of the finest coastal sites on the Mediterranean, overlooking the islands where a Carthaginian trading-post was established in the 4th century B.C. The Kasbah contains the remains of the citadel, old mosques and Ottoman-style palaces as well as the vestiges of a traditional urban structure associated with a deep-rooted sense of community”

I didn’t have time to visit the Kasbah, which looked an interesting part of town with its narrow alleys and old buildings, but I subsequently read in a few Internet blogs that it is not a very safe place for tourists to visit, so maybe it was just as well that I didn’t. Even around the main streets in the newer parts of Algiers, I felt a little uneasy at times, because there are a lot of people hanging around watching you. I was told that unemployment is very high in Algeria, and that is why there are so many people on the streets with apparently little to do.

I made this into a panoramic shot by cropping the top and bottom of my original composition, then applying a few minor adjustments to levels, contrast, saturation and USM.

Sorry there’s not more contrast in this, but it was very late in the day when I visited the city. If I had been there an hour earlier, this would have looked more impressive with the sun on the white buildings.