Oran Province
Oran changed hands from Andalusi to Spanish (1509-1708) to Ottoman to French—each conqueror built atop the last. Camus set "The Plague" here; Raï was born here. Algeria's second port remains worth fighting over.
Oran exists because the Mediterranean exists—and because everyone wanted to control this stretch of it. Founded in 903 AD by Andalusi traders, the city became a prize passed between empires: Almoravids, Almohads, Zianids, then Spanish conquistadors who held it from 1509 to 1708, building the fortress of Santa Cruz that still crowns the Murjajo heights. When the Ottomans finally took it, they inherited a city already multilayered with Moorish, Jewish, and Iberian refugees from the Reconquista.
Plague shaped Oran as much as conquest. Epidemics in 1556 and 1678 killed thousands; earthquakes flattened what plague spared. This cycle of destruction and rebuilding attracted French colonizers seeking empty land to resettle—and Albert Camus, who lived here from 1941-1942 and set "The Plague" in a fictionalized version of the city. Though Camus won the Nobel Prize, he "does not exist in Algerian memory"—erased like the Spanish fortifications slowly crumbling above the port.
Today Oran is Algeria's second-largest port and the birthplace of Raï music, the protest rhythms that emerged in 1920s "Little Paris." The city metabolizes its contested past into cultural export. By 2026, Oran's deepwater port facilities and LNG terminals at nearby Arzew position it as a key node in Europe's energy security—the same strategic value that made it worth conquering for twelve centuries.