Saida Province
The 2nd Foreign Regiment's Mediterranean recruits made Saida their base from 1854. Railways arrived 1862. The Legion is gone; the infrastructure remains.
Saida was founded in 1854 as a French military outpost, and it stayed that way. The 2nd Foreign Regiment made Saida its home—Mediterranean recruits, mostly, unlike the 1st Regiment's northern Europeans at Sidi Bel Abbes. By World War II, Saida housed the Legion's primary training camp.
The Oran-Béchar narrow-gauge railway arrived in 1862, connecting Saida to the colonial economy. The railway determined what the outpost would become: a logistics node for the high steppe region, feeding agricultural products and minerals to the coast. The Foreign Legion's presence meant security for settlers. Security attracted investment. Investment built infrastructure.
The province sits in the high steppe, transitional territory between Tell Atlas and Saharan Atlas. This geography made it natural Legion country—visibility, defensibility, control of routes. Today the military ghost has faded, but the infrastructure remains. Saida province was carved from its neighbors in 1984, its boundaries following administrative logic rather than topography. The railway still runs. The barracks are repurposed. What the Legion built, Algeria inherited.