Museums and cultural institutions of the Casbah

Built between 1798 and 1800 for Mustapha Pasha, dey of Algiers, and one of the rare palaces of the city that came through the French occupation without major transformation. Three vaulted vestibules lead to a courtyard 9.5 metres square with an octagonal fountain, surrounded on all four sides by two levels of galleries, four pointed horseshoe arches to a side. The whole building covers 709 square metres.

Since 2007 it has held the national museum of illumination, miniature and calligraphy. It is described in more detail on the dars and palaces page.

The original construction date is not known. What is documented is that in 1789 the finance minister of Dey Mohamed Ben Othman bought the house for his daughter, Khdaouedj el-Amia, whose name it carries. It stands in the lower Casbah and may sit on the site of an eighth-century zaouia.

It is now the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. Architecturally it is worth going for the entrance sequence alone: the corridor is lined with arcades resting on rows of three columns, turning the sides of the passage into a series of shallow niches, and the entrance hall is barrel vaulted.

A complex of four palaces and several houses on the seafront, covering more than half a hectare, built in the sixteenth century under Ramdan and Mustafa Pasha and lived in by the ship captains and by the men who worked the port. It survived the demolition of the marine quarter after 1830, which almost nothing else did.

Its restoration was launched in July 1988 and carried through the 1990s across about four thousand square metres, reproducing faience wall cladding, carved woodwork, wrought iron grilles, marble and corbels. That work also opened an argument among conservation specialists about how much reconstruction is honest, which has not been settled.

It is the only place where the relationship between the medina and its harbour can still be read on the ground.

On the street now called Rue Bessa Lakhdar, formerly the Rue des Abderames, stands the house that French paratroopers dynamited on 8 October 1957, rebuilt as it had been. It became a museum in 2006, housed a sewing centre for a period, and reopened in 2019. It is run by the local authority and entry is free.

Its displays are framed photographs and press cuttings along the walls, covering 1956 and 1957 and the fighters of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers. The war page sets out what happened there and where the sources disagree about it.

The National Museum of Antiquities and Islamic Art is not in the Casbah, but it holds a piece of it on its outside wall: the surviving public fountain known as the Calle aux Vins, built by Dey Husayn in 1820, moved twice, and finally set against the wall of the Department of Antiquities, where maintenance by the chief architect of historic monuments is recorded in correspondence of 27 May 1968.

Work in the quarter is carried by the national conservation agency and by voluntary organisations, among them the Association Arts et Patrimoine d'Alger. Restoration of the citadel began in the late 1960s and is still under way, and the dey's palace has been under a restoration begun in 2006 and remains behind scaffolding. In 2016 the Algerian culture minister stated that six hundred and seventy five million euros had been spent on the Casbah over the years.

Set against that: a recent count put 1,816 buildings still standing, about forty per cent critically damaged or ruined, and 373 collapsed.

This page does not publish opening hours or admission prices, because they change and a heritage page carrying stale practical information is worse than one carrying none. Check directly before going. The one thing worth knowing in advance is that the Musée Ali la Pointe is on a narrow street that is easy to walk past, and that local people will point you to it if you ask.

If you run one of these institutions and something here is wrong or out of date, please write to admin@casbah-alger.com and it will be corrected.