It is a sunny afternoon in the Algerian port city of Oran (Wahran in Arabic), and I am poking around the ruins of the Palais du Bey. The crumbling, seaside palace was constructed by the Ottomans in the early 18th century, after Turkish forces wrested control of the city from the Spanish, who had seized Oran in 1509. The Spanish snatched it right back a quarter-century later — only for the Ottomans to reconquer Oran toward the turn of the 19th century.
Then came the French colonial conquest of Algeria in 1830, which lasted another 132 years. Each invader left their imprint on Oran. The Palais du Bey had a harem and hamams, but the French didn’t like taking baths, says Haflid, a guide-for-hire who touts his services by the whitewashed shed that serves as a visitors center. “So, they constructed showers,” he says with a chuckle. Despite the weather, business here is hardly brisk. Aside from me, only two elderly Algerian women in colorful abayas have turned up today.
“This isn’t Ottoman?” one of them asks Haflid, tapping her cane against the expansive stone terrace that overlooks a slice of blue Mediterranean.
“No, no,” Haflid corrects her. “The terrace was built by the Spanish army.” He goes on as we head back inside the dilapidated complex, gesturing toward a fragment of mortared wall, an arched doorway dappled with flowers, a cavernous horse stable, a cobwebbed prison cell: “This is French, that’s Algerian, that’s Ottoman, that’s Spanish, that’s French.”
For anyone brought up to consider the historical record as something solid and tangibly linear — a marble pedestal on which the present day rests — Oran’s history can feel more like a hall of mirrors. The city was founded as an Andalusian trading hub in the early 10th century. By the French colonial era, two-thirds of the population belonged to a European settler population known as pieds-noirs. (The term means “black feet” in French, although whether that’s a reference to grape-crushing or forgoing shoes, no one knows.) Today, sitting between beaches and cliffs on Algeria’s northwestern coast, Oran is fully Algerian, but the city remains geographically and culturally linked to the rest of the greater Mediterranean. Just like the Palais du Bey — one of the city’s most striking, if neglected, landmarks — Oran itself is a palimpsest. One can turn a corner and walk from an Ottoman-era mosque over to an art deco turret, from a Parisian-style opera house to a stand selling karantika (a harissa-topped, chickpea-based street food with supposedly Spanish origins). Guides like Haflid keep track of who built what. For everyone else, this is simply Oran.
Fresh off my plane in Algiers, I’d ducked into a cafe near the Casbah — a tangle of slouching alleyways connected by vertiginous staircases, like a game of snakes and ladders come to life — while waiting for the train. The Algerian couple at the next table asked me where I was headed. “Oran!” they responded in unison. “Oh, Oran is great. It’s a fiesta.” My slow train chugged into Oran’s stark-white art deco station six hours later, after traveling through 250 miles of vast scrubland, boxy towns and herds of roaming sheep flanked by low hills.
First things first, I want to see a Rai show. Nowhere is Oran’s fusional joie de vivre more apparent than in Rai, which originated in the Mediterranean port city back in the 1920s. It is unapologetically bawdy, even taboo. “The people adore God, but I [adore] beer,” once sang the legendary Rai artist Cheikha Rimiti, whose 1954 song “Charrak Gatta” is considered a reference to young women losing their virginity. Rai is performed by women as well as men; traditionally, it drew on Jewish and Andalusian, classical Arabic and bedouin musical traditions. Newer artists fuse styles with hip-hop, but Rai is still king in Oran. It is distinctly countercultural: Singers adopt the titles cheb and cheba, meaning “young” — a play on classical honorifics cheikh and cheikha, or “elder.” Many have achieved international fame. Cheb Khaled, born in Oran in 1960, is nicknamed the King of Rai and sang at South Africa’s 2010 World Cup. Cheikha Rabia, daughter of a double amputee World War I veteran and known for her powerful voice, still fills venues in her adopted city of Paris after five decades of performing.
But by barely 8 p.m., Oran’s downtown shops are already shuttered. Joyriding teens on a motorcycle whoop by, but this is hardly the party I’d been promised. When I ask about Rai, people laugh awkwardly. “You wouldn’t expect girls to go for Rai music outside in public. But in private, it’s what everybody listens to,” explains Chahrazade Douah, a French-Algerian journalist based in Spain. She adds: “How can you not dance in private?”
“There’s this one bar — Le Cardinal,” a waiter, Lounes, confides over mint tea. “A classical Rai singer named Redouane is always there. Listen, go in and ask for the manager, Nabil.” He pulls out his phone and shows me a muscular guy with slicked-back hair. “Tell him Lounes sent you.”
Inside Le Cardinal, a dozen or so men stand crowded around an old-fashioned wood-paneled bar. Their eyes widen when I walk in. The room is hazy with smoke. Nabil bounds down the stairs, shakes my hand warmly, and tells me that Redouane will go on that night at half past midnight. As beloved as Rai music is to liberal-minded Oranais, it still carries an aura of subversiveness, and not because the only other woman in Le Cardinal is going around tucking dinar bills into her sheer bustier: Rai was banned by conservative governments throughout much of Algeria’s history following independence. The crackdown intensified in the 1990s, and many singers fled to France.
In 1994, two years into an 11-year civil war waged by Islamist groups (dubbed “The Black Decade”), 26-year-old Cheb Hasni was gunned down near his parents’ house in Oran. Music producer Rachid Baba Ahmed was assassinated in his Oran record shop a year later. Cheb Khaled and countless other Algerian artists sought refuge in France. With this history in mind, it is hard not to get a little misty-eyed watching Redouane start his set hours later, grinning and wailing into the mic in Arabic and French. A galloping rhythm pounds the speakers with a metallic reverb. Redouane peppers his songs with dedications to the audience — including to me. “Sophiaaa,” he croons, “soyez la bienvenue!” (“welcome”) — a Rai musical tradition known in Arabic as tabriha. Before long, even the most dedicated of drinkers have abandoned their whiskies and begun flailing their arms to the beat.
Nightcaps in a bar, a risque song — it may not seem like much, but this is still Algeria, even if it doesn’t look it. “You’d think we were in 19th-century Paris,” marvels Monsieur Khaddar, the manager at my hotel in town, Les Ambassadeurs. We are speeding by Haussmannian apartment blocks. A hand-painted sign for Gauloises cigarettes flashes by, then a shoe shop: Chaussures au Pied Mignon. Let it be a testament to Oran’s almost nonexistent tourism industry that Khaddar has abandoned his post at reception to play chauffeur. (Around 2 million foreign passport-holders visited Algeria in 2019, mostly from the Algerian diaspora, compared to 13 million in neighboring Morocco.) We follow a series of switchbacks up the hill to the 16th-century, Spanish-built Santa Cruz Fort. The Palais du Bey is visible in miniature against a backdrop of blue sea and the industrial-looking port, filled with warehouses and Chinese-lettered cargo ships.
Up on the hill overlooking Oran, we park the car in a dirt lot and climb a looping walkway up to the fortress. “We lived through black years,” Khaddar tells me, meaning Algeria’s civil war. “For 10 years, we couldn’t go out, we couldn’t go to cabarets.” Khaddar, now in his late 60s, explains how armed Islamist groups set up roadblocks and carried out kidnappings and assassinations in Oran, targeting people — like Rai performers — perceived as promoting Western or liberal ideas. This reign of terror feels mercifully distant as I watch Algerian women in floral-patterned dresses pose for selfies in front of the Chapel of Santa Cruz, a 19th-century landmark featuring a Virgin Mary statue with arms extended over the coast, Oran’s answer to Christ the Redeemer.
Still, I keep hearing that it’s impossible to appreciate Oran’s pluralist heritage without going to Tlemcen, a city that lies 100 miles to the west of Oran, toward the Moroccan border, and by all accounts several galaxies away, too. It was the kingdom of the Zayyanids, a medieval Berber dynasty, and a center of Islamic learning. Jews and Muslims from Andalusia settled in Tlemcen during the Spanish Inquisition, importing artisanal savoir-faire and musical traditions like the Nuba while turning parts of the city into an ersatz Granada. As Chahrazade Douah, the French-Algerian journalist, puts it: “If Oran is the most Mediterranean city in Algeria, then Tlemcen is where Arabic, Amazigh (Berber) and Andalusian influences blend to create a distinct culture you find nowhere else in North Africa.”
Bright and early, I pile into a shared minivan taxi and speed off. Away from the coast, the landscape turns drier, the light a glinting gold. It takes two hours by highway to reach Tlemcen. My first stop is El Mechouar Palace, the seat of Zayyanid power in the 13th century. When Tlemcen was declared the “capital of Islamic Culture” back in 2011 by the Rabat-based Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO), the fortified palace got a somewhat Disneyfied restoration. It looks like a mini-Alhambra, with Quranic carvings on latticed stone and a tranquil courtyard pool surrounded by arched pillars. In one tiled room, a life-sized, red-lipped mannequin in a fez — the Zayyanid sultan, apparently — holds court from a fuchsia throne.
Elsewhere in the city, I visit a calligraphy museum with mannequin scribes hunched over hand-traced Arabic; the 14th-century Sidi Boumediene Mosque, where a woman in a black abaya sits outside intricately etched brass doors murmuring Quranic prayers; and the domed, incense-scented tomb of Sidi Boumediene, a 12th-century Seville-born Sufi mystic and poet. It’s all dazzling, and sumptuously preserved, but the overall effect feels curiously monophonic. Tlemcen was home to a flourishing Jewish community for centuries (the Maghreb had a Jewish presence from Phoenician times), but French colonialists sowed discord when they selectively naturalized Jewish Algerians as French citizens in 1870 under the Cremieux Decree. After Algeria’s independence in 1962, almost all fled to France or Israel. Although Oran isn’t the only Algerian city with a melting pot heritage, acknowledging that history can prove controversial. “We are supposed to have only one language, only one religion, only one culture,” observes the Algerian writer Hedia Bensahli in her 2023 book “Jewish Algeria” (“L’Algerie Juive”), which I spot in the window display of an Oran bookshop. “Algeria, whatever one says, is like any other country on earth. It can’t be stamped with the seal of uniformity. It is plural.”
Back in the city, I phone Kouider Metair, founder and director of Bel Horizon, a cultural heritage association created in 2001, to ask about Oran’s syncretic heritage. “The law says that the patrimony is every civilization from prehistoric times,” explains Metair. “From an ideological perspective, that’s not entirely accepted.” In addition to preservation projects (like saving the Palais du Bey from developers who wanted to raze it and build a five-star hotel), Bel Horizon publishes guidebooks, held a walking rally up to Santa Cruz Fort that drew 20,000 people, and is petitioning to have Rai music inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list. “On s’amuse,” he said. “We have fun. That’s what patrimony means. It’s not just history, books, war.”
Over in Bel Horizon’s headquarters, a stone’s throw from the palm-lined waterfront, Metair pops open a web browser and shows me a renovation proposal for Derb, Oran’s old Jewish neighborhood. The neoclassical edifices — shaped like a ship’s hull to adapt to Oran’s hilly terrain, Metair explains — have been given a computer-generated facelift. “Historic buildings are collective memory, but they require enormous upkeep,” he says. It strikes me that rehabilitating the city’s shared heritage is a bit like restoring Oran’s vanished communities by architectural proxy. The Great Synagogue, built in 1880, is now a mosque, while the mosaic-tiled art deco Cathedrale du Sacre-Cœur is an airy library frequented by students and street cats. I’d wandered inside expecting pews, only to find librarians carting around books in the ghostly light passing through the stained glass.
It’s now late, and metal storefronts are clanging shut. Metair sends an architecture graduate, Zack, to escort me back downtown. We walk down an arcaded street bathed in shadows where he tells me the writer Albert Camus — who set “The Plague” in Oran — once lived. There’s no plaque: Bel Horizon tracked the residence down by identifying the opposite building from a photograph that Camus’ wife took. “And see that pyramid shape over there?” Zack points to the whimsical top of a rectilinear art deco building. “In ‘The Minotaur’”— the author’s lugubrious 1939 essay on Oran — “Camus says that it looks like an upside-down pastry.”
We hop on the brightly lit tram. “So, am I dropping you back at your hotel?” Zack asks.
“Well,” I pause. “It’s my last night, and I’d love to see more Rai.”
Zack takes out his mobile phone, conducts a short conversation in Arabic, and turns back to me. “You’re in luck,” he says. “There’s a concert tonight down at the Corniche” — Oran’s nightclub-lined seafront, about a 20-minute taxi ride from the center. An hour later, and we’re dancing in a pink-lit discotheque while a four-piece Rai band jams on drums and keyboards. Camus once called Oran the “capital of boredom,” far from the revelry of Paris, but I doubt he’d stand by that statement today.
However, hours later in the early morning, Rai beats ringing in my ears as I am driven through hushed streets back to my empty hotel, I do agree with another of Camus’ assessments: “Oran has no further need of writers: she is awaiting tourists.”
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