3 Days in Constantine

Start with the city's backstory. The museum grew out of an archaeological society founded in 1852 and is built like a small Greco-Roman house around a garden. Of more than 17,000 pieces, around 7,000 are on show in 14 rooms, from prehistory to a gallery of Algerian painters.

The star is a winged bronze Victory found in the Casbah in 1855 by French soldiers who were turning it into barracks. Tomorrow you'll see her copy on top of a monument. Look also for Roman mosaics, a life-size marble statue of the empress Faustina from Djemila, and objects from the tomb of the Numidian king Massinissa. A good primer for day three.

The palace of the last bey of Constantine is the best-preserved Ottoman building in the region. Ahmed Bey began it in 1825, razed a block of neighbors' houses to make room, and finished in 1835. He enjoyed it for about two years: French troops took the city in 1837. They made it a military headquarters, and independent Algeria turned it into a museum in 1982.

Inside are marble galleries on columns, three gardens, tiled walls and a courtyard of orange and palm trees, with wall paintings of the bey's travels to Istanbul, Cairo and Mecca. Look for the green, nail-studded door on Place Si El Haouès where the visit starts.

The Casbah was the bey's administrative quarter, and it is the least old part of the old town. The French knocked down mosques and big houses here after 1837 and built a barracks, handed back to civilian use in 2013. A few Ottoman pieces survive: the Koubet Bechir mosque, and a prison that local legend places in old Roman cisterns.

Walk on to Kef Chekara, the rock edge where, the story goes, unfaithful wives and the bey's enemies were thrown into the gorge. Take it as legend, and take the view. Then wander downhill into the Souika streets, the lower old town.

Lunch around Rue Larbi Ben M'hidi means bouzelouf, a sheep's head singed to remove the hair, then simmered until the cheeks and tongue turn tender, or grilled over coals. The name is probably Berber for head, and a folk story that ties it to a guillotined man is doubted by linguists. It's cheap and popular, served in a tomato and chickpea sauce.

If that's too much, ask for a grilled skewer instead. You have a whole afternoon on your feet ahead.

Nearby stands the Great Mosque, or Djamaa El Kebir, begun around 1135 under the Hammadid dynasty and rebuilt many times since, including in 1766 under the Ottomans. A few minutes away is the El Bey Mosque from 1703, also called the Souq El Ghezal Mosque after the market beside it.

Both are working mosques, so enjoy them from outside, and from the door if you're invited. Cover your arms and legs, and avoid prayer times, especially Friday midday.

At the lip of the gorge is the Mellah Slimane footbridge, a 125 m suspension bridge that opened in April 1925 and links the old town with the station side. Ferdinand Arnodin designed it, as he did tomorrow's Sidi M'Cid bridge, and its cables were replaced in 2000.

It wobbles when people walk on it, which is the point: the river below is a thread. You enter from the old city through a building with a staircase. Look along the gorge to Bab El Kantra, the oldest crossing, which the Ottoman bey Salah rebuilt in the 1790s using stones from the Roman amphitheater.

End on the biggest of the old bridges. The Sidi Rached viaduct was built from 1908 to 1912 by the engineer Aubin Eyraud, with Paul Séjourné, and was once the tallest concrete bridge in the world. It runs 447 m on 27 arches, one 70 m wide, and reaches 107 m at its highest point, joining downtown to the railway station.

Walk across as the light fades, which means around 5:30 pm from November to January and nearly 8 pm in June. Then have dinner near the station or back by your hotel.

This is the postcard. The Sidi M'Cid bridge was designed by Ferdinand Arnodin and opened in April 1912. It is about 165 m long and hangs 175 m above the river, which made it the highest bridge in the world until the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado opened in November 1929. Locals call it Gantaret El Hbal, the rope bridge.

Walk across, then look down: a natural stone arch beneath it hides the river from the deck. Twelve of the cables were replaced in 2000. Morning light hits the old town, so it photographs best early.

Climb the 36 stone steps at the end of the bridge to the war memorial. Its first stone was laid on 18 November 1918, a week after the Armistice, and it opened on 7 May 1930. The 21 m arch is modeled on Trajan's arch at Timgad, and the Victory on top copies the bronze from the museum. More than 800 names are engraved, of Muslim, Christian and Jewish men from Constantine who died fighting for France in the First World War.

How you feel about that is your business. The reason to come is the terrace, with a view table from 1936 and the best panorama of the city on its rock. In 2015 it hosted the first Armistice ceremony in independent Algeria.

Back in the center for the dish of the east: chakhchoukha, torn flatbread soaked in a spicy tomato and chickpea sauce with lamb, eaten across the Constantine region and the Aurès mountains. Another local dish is tlitli, hand-rolled pasta in a red or, in the Constantine version, a white sauce. Both are filling, so pace yourself for the afternoon.

The cable car starts at Place Tatache Belkacem on the old town side, crosses the gorge to the Ben Badis hospital and goes on to the Emir Abdelkader neighborhood. The Swiss firm Garaventa built it, and it opened on 5 June 2008. It closed in 2018 for technical faults, went through a long refurbishment, and reopened in April 2025. The ride is 1,690 m long in two sections and takes about six minutes.

From the cabin you see the gorge walls and the rock from above. It is public transport as much as a ride, so locals use it too.

Constantine's newest bridge is also its biggest statement. The Salah Bey viaduct is cable-stayed, was inaugurated on 26 July 2014, and has a main section 756 m long, with the towers reaching 130 m. It is named for the Ottoman bey who ruled the city from 1770 to 1792, and people call it the eighth wonder of a city of seven bridges.

It is a road bridge. Ask your taxi driver to cross it on the way south to the mosque. Whether you can walk it is not confirmed.

The mosque and its Islamic university are huge, and a very different Constantine from the old town. The project was planned in the early 1970s under President Boumédiène, and an Egyptian architect, Mustafa Moussa, designed it. The university opened in 1984, the mosque on 31 October 1994. It holds up to 19,000 worshippers, with minarets 107 m high and a dome of 64 m.

It's named for Emir Abdelkader, who led the resistance against the French in the 1830s and 1840s. Come for the scale and the courtyard. The tram stops here.

End with the music Constantine is known for. Malouf is the city's classical Arab-Andalusian tradition, which locals link to Seville in the days of Al-Andalus. A nouba is a suite in five movements, opened by an instrumental piece. Its best-known voice was Mohamed Tahar Fergani (1928-2016), nicknamed the Nightingale of Constantine, and the regional theater has carried his name since December 2017.

Ask your hotel about the program at the theater or at a small venue. No schedule was confirmed, so treat the evening as a possibility. If nothing is on, put a Fergani recording on at a café near Place du 1er Novembre.

The Roman town was called Cuicul, and UNESCO listed it in 1982 for its adaptation of Roman town planning to a mountain setting. Start in the small three-room museum by the entrance, whose statues and mosaics give you the faces the ruins no longer have.

Then pick a guide at the gate if you want one: the ruins have almost no signs, and a guide was quoted at around 700 DZD (4.60 EUR, 5.10 USD).

The main street, the cardo maximus, starts near the entrance and runs downhill through the town. First comes the Christian quarter, where by the fifth century there were three basilicas, a baptistery and a bath. Fifty meters on, on the left, is the House of Bacchus, a fifth-century mansion, then the Grand Baths of AD 183.

Cuicul was founded in the first century as a military post on a narrow triangle of land between two rivers, and the terrain bent the standard Roman grid. That is why it looks different from Timgad.

Cuicul got its grandest buildings in the third century. Under Caracalla the town took down part of its old walls and built a new forum, the Severan square, with bigger buildings around it. The Arch of Caracalla, the western gate, closes the square, and the Severan Temple stands on it.

Keep going to the older forum, ringed by the remains of the Julia Basilica and the Capitol, a temple to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. The Cosinus Market and a subterranean prison are beside it.

The village by the gate has basic hotels, one with a courtyard restaurant next to the ruins. Expect grilled meat, a soup, bread and salad, or couscous. Nothing fancy, and prices are low. After a morning on stone in the sun, an hour in the shade is part of the plan.

The theater is the last stop, and an unusual one: the builders put it outside the town walls, cut into a hillside, because the terrain left no space inside. Sit on the stone steps and look out over the hills.

The road back to Constantine takes about 100 minutes, so you can be in time for a bowl of chorba or djari soup near the old town.