49 Fun Facts About Algeria

Algeria became Africa's largest country in 2011, when which nation split in two?

Sudan. When South Sudan broke away in July 2011, Sudan slipped from first to third in Africa by area, behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Algeria inherited the top spot without gaining an inch.

The name Algeria derives from Algiers, whose Arabic name al-Jazā'ir means what?

The islands. Small islets once lay just off the city, but from 1525 they were joined to the shore by harbour works, so the capital named for its islands has all but lost them.

French is widely used in Algeria but has no official status; which language became official beside Arabic in 2016?

Tamazight. The Berber language was recognised as a national language in 2002 and made official in 2016, which means it can now appear on government documents beside Arabic.

Which mountain system separates Algeria's populous coast from the Sahara?

The Atlas. In Algeria its two chains run parallel to the Mediterranean and wall the fertile north off from the Sahara, which begins on their far side and covers more than four-fifths of the country.

Algeria's highest peak, Mount Tahat, stands in which Saharan mountain range?

The Hoggar. Many of its jagged peaks are the hard plugs of extinct volcanoes, left standing after the softer cones around them wore away, which is why the massif bristles with dark towers and needles of rock.

Numidian king Masinissa's cavalry helped Rome defeat which Carthaginian general at Zama in 202 BC?

Hannibal. Masinissa had fought for Carthage in Spain before switching sides, and at Zama the returning cavalry's charge into Hannibal's rear decided the day; Rome then backed his claim to the throne of Numidia.

Numidia's capital Cirta is today which Algerian city?

Constantine. Laid in ruins during a Roman civil war, the city was rebuilt in 313 and took the name of the emperor who restored it; its spans over a deep gorge now earn it the nickname City of Bridges.

Saint Augustine was bishop of Hippo Regius, which is now which Algerian city?

Annaba. Augustine was bishop of the city for 34 years and died there in 430, in the early months of a long siege, as an invading army closed in on Roman Africa.

Which emperor founded Timgad, the 'Pompeii of Africa' in the Aurès Mountains, around 100 AD?

Trajan. He created the town from nothing as a colony for retired legionaries, laid out on a strict grid, and worked his own name into its official title, Colonia Marciana Ulpia Traiana Thamugadi.

Which Berber queen of the Aurès Mountains routed an invading Umayyad army in the 7th century?

Kahina. Her Arab enemies gave her that title, meaning priestess or seer, because she was said to foretell the future; her birth name was Dihya, and she ruled until a second invasion defeated her.

Which Allied operation of November 1942 put American and British troops ashore at Algiers?

Operation Torch. After the landings Algiers became the headquarters of Allied forces in North Africa and, for a time, the provisional capital of France while Paris was still under occupation.

The Zayyanid dynasty, which ruled the central Maghreb for three centuries from the 1230s, made which city its capital?

Tlemcen. Caravan routes from across the Sahara ended there, and its trade and brilliant court made it one of the Maghreb's great cities, until Spain seized its outlet to the sea in 1509 and choked the commerce.

Which Algerian port, a medieval exporter of beeswax, gave French its word for candle, 'bougie'?

Béjaïa. Known to Europeans as Bugia or Bougie, it shipped so much wax that its name came to mean the candle itself; it is also where the young Fibonacci learned the Hindu-Arabic numerals he took home to Italy.

The Regency of Algiers was founded in 1516 by which corsair brothers?

Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa. Invited by the city's ruler to drive out a Spanish garrison, the corsair brothers seized Algiers for themselves, and Hayreddin then placed it under the Ottoman sultan.

In 1827 the Dey of Algiers struck the French consul with what, handing France its pretext to invade?

A fly-whisk. The Dey lost his temper when the consul stonewalled him over debts France had owed for army supplies since the 1790s; Paris answered with a three-year blockade and then the invasion of 1830.

Who led Algerian resistance to the French for fifteen years until 1847 and later saved Christians in Damascus?

Abdelkader. He surrendered on a promise of exile in the East, but France broke its word and held him for almost five years; his rescue of Christians in 1860 later won him honours from several countries.

The 1945 massacre that catalysed Algeria's independence movement took place in Guelma and which other town?

Sétif. On 8 May 1945, the day Europe celebrated victory over Germany, police fired on marchers who had been told not to carry nationalist flags, and the reprisals that followed killed thousands.

The Algerian War began on 1 November 1954, 'Toussaint Rouge', with attacks by which newly formed movement?

FLN. The National Liberation Front struck across Algeria before dawn on All Saints' Day, and France's interior minister, the future president François Mitterrand, replied that the only possible negotiation was war.

Which March 1962 agreement between France and Algeria's provisional government led to a ceasefire and an independence referendum?

The Évian Accords. Named for the French lakeside spa where the talks were held, they ended more than seven years of war, and about 91% of French voters endorsed them in a referendum.

Which French leader, returned to power in 1958, granted Algeria independence in 1962?

Charles de Gaulle. The settlers and officers who engineered his return felt betrayed when he offered Algerians self-determination; independence on 5 July 1962 ended 132 years of French rule.

Who was elected independent Algeria's first president in 1963?

Ahmed Ben Bella. Decorated for bravery in the French army during the Second World War, he went on to fight France, and in 1965 his own defence minister overthrew him and kept him locked away for some fourteen years.

Algeria's 'Black Decade' civil war began in 1992 after the army did what?

Cancelled an election. The Islamic Salvation Front had dominated the first round and was heading for power when the generals stepped in and banned it, setting off a war with Islamist rebels that lasted a decade.

Weeks of mass protests forced which Algerian president to resign in April 2019, after 20 years in power?

Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Rarely seen in public since a stroke in 2013, he dropped his plan to seek a fifth term at 82, but the marches went on until the army chief told him to go at once.

Algeria's flag sets a red star and crescent on halves of white and which other colour?

Green. It is the colour of Islam; the wartime government in exile had flown a version of the flag since 1958, so it was simply kept when independence came in July 1962.

What is Algeria's currency?

The dinar. Its name descends from the denarius, the silver coin of ancient Rome, by way of the gold coins of the caliphs, while its small change, now too worthless to use, kept the French name centime.

Which state-owned energy giant was founded in 1963, the year after Algeria's independence?

Sonatrach. Founded in 1963, it took charge of the Saharan fields when Algeria nationalised the industry in 1971, over loud French protest, and it remains a major supplier of natural gas to Europe.

Which animal is the national animal of Algeria?

The fennec fox. The smallest member of the dog family, it sheds the Saharan heat through ears that are huge for its body, and Algeria's national football team is nicknamed Les Fennecs.

Which dish is recognised as Algeria's national dish?

Couscous. In 2020 UNESCO added the craft of making and sharing it to its heritage list, after Algeria and three of its North African neighbours put their rival claims aside and applied together.

Raï, the Algerian pop sung by artists styled cheb and cheba, took shape in the 1920s in which port city?

Oran. Rooted in the songs of rural western Algeria, raï found its voice in the port's nightclubs and cabarets, among the poor, and its taboo-free lyrics made it the music of the young.

Which writer, born into poverty in French Algeria in 1913, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957?

Albert Camus. He set The Stranger and The Plague in the Algeria of his youth and took the prize at just 44, only to die in a car crash little more than two years later.

Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth during Algeria's war, was born on which Caribbean island?

Martinique. Posted to an Algerian psychiatric hospital in 1953, Fanon found himself treating both torture victims and the soldiers who tortured them, so he resigned in 1956 and joined the independence struggle.

The Great Mosque of Algiers, whose 265-metre minaret became the world's tallest, was built by a firm from which country?

China. A Chinese construction firm built the mosque, which was begun when Algeria's state revenues were high; once they slumped, critics attacked its enormous cost.

Which sandstone plateau in the Algerian Sahara, a UNESCO site, is famed for thousands of prehistoric rock paintings?

Tassili n'Ajjer. Its older paintings show cattle herds and herdsmen from an age when the Sahara was grassy savanna, and only the latest add camels, so the cliffs record the desert's arrival.

Which fashion designer, born in French Algeria in 1936, became head of the house of Dior at just 21?

Yves Saint Laurent. When Christian Dior died suddenly in 1957, his young assistant inherited the world's most famous fashion house, and his first collection, the flared Trapeze line, caused a sensation.

The hundreds of thousands of European settlers who fled Algeria at independence in 1962 were known by what nickname?

Pieds-noirs. The nickname means 'black feet', and nobody is sure why; most of those who left had been born in Algeria, so the France that 'repatriated' them was a country many had never lived in.

The hilltop citadel that gives the Casbah of Algiers its name was built during which period?

The Ottoman Regency. The fortress, or qasba, went up over the 16th century, and its name spread downhill to the whole walled city of palaces and mosques beneath it, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Algeria's greatest World Cup moment came in 1982 with a 2-1 win over which team?

West Germany. Days later the Germans beat Austria 1-0, a result that sent both through and Algeria home, and the outcry made FIFA schedule every final group game to kick off at the same time.

Which winger captained Algeria to the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations title?

Riyad Mahrez. His last-minute free kick beat Nigeria in the semi-final, and an early, heavily deflected goal in the final sank Senegal 1-0 to give Algeria its first title since 1990.

Zinedine Zidane's parents emigrated to France from a village in which Berber-speaking region of Algeria?

Kabylia. His father left a hill village there for Paris in 1953, found little work and moved the family to the Marseille estate where Zidane was born; 'I am proud that they come from Kabylie,' he has said.

Algeria sealed its land border with which neighbour in 1994, a closure that was still in force thirty years later?

Morocco. Algeria shut the frontier after a 1994 hotel attack in Marrakesh poisoned relations already strained over Western Sahara, and the crossing stayed sealed.

Around 99% of Algerians are Muslim, nearly all of them followers of which branch of Islam?

Sunni. Most Algerians follow its Maliki school of law, though a small Ibadi community still lives in the desert towns of the M'zab valley, founded by the descendants of refugees a thousand years ago.

During the war of independence, French prospectors made which discovery at Hassi Messaoud in the Algerian Sahara in 1956?

Oil. The Hassi Messaoud field became the heart of Algeria's crude production, and oil and gas went on to dominate the economy of the independent country that inherited the field six years later.

Which Algerian singer, nicknamed the King of Raï, became a global star with the hits 'Didi' and 'Aïcha'?

Khaled. He dropped the 'Cheb', a title meaning 'young', from his stage name in the early 1990s, just as his single 'Didi' was carrying raï far beyond Algeria.

At Reggane in the Algerian Sahara in February 1960, France carried out its first test of what?

A nuclear bomb. The test was code-named Gerboise Bleue, 'blue jerboa', after a desert rodent, and France was allowed to go on testing in the Sahara until 1966, four years after Algeria's independence.

Ibn Khaldun, though born in Tunis, wrote which famous work while staying in Algeria?

The Muqaddima. He wrote this 'introduction' to his world history while sheltering in a remote fortress near Tiaret, and its attempt to explain why societies rise and decay is often called a forerunner of sociology.

Which veiled nomadic people of Algeria's far south are nicknamed the 'Blue People' for their indigo-dyed cloth?

The Tuareg. Among them it is the men who wear the veil, an indigo cloth called the tagelmust, while the women go unveiled.

Algeria's provinces, redrawn several times since independence, are officially known by which name?

Wilayas. The word means the territory a governor rules and shares its Arabic root with the Turkish vilayet; the independence fighters used it for their war zones, and the new state later gave it to its provinces.

Which Spanish writer, captured by Barbary corsairs in 1575, spent five years as a slave in Algiers?

Miguel de Cervantes. The money his parents raised was only enough to ransom his brother, so he stayed, tried to escape again and again, and was finally bought out of slavery by friars in 1580.

Which invaders crossed from Spain in about 429 AD and ended Roman rule in what is now Algeria?

The Vandals. Ancient writers put them at 80,000, children and the old included, a figure some historians think inflated; their kingdom lasted a century before Byzantine armies destroyed it.