Travel Guide Aïn Temouchent

The city of Aïn Temouchent has many assets, especially with its 80 km of almost virgin coastline, but remains a little out of the way, wedged between the three major cities of Oran, Tlemcen and Sidi-Bel-Abbès. In December 1999, an earthquake devastated much of the old city, which was able to be rebuilt and new facilities built thanks to a loan from the World Bank. The public garden, for example, was designed by an Algerian landscape architect who graduated from the French landscape school of Versailles.History. Aïn Temouchent, whose Arab-Berber name means "source of jackals", has known a very early human development as evidenced by the bones discovered in the early twentieth century of the so-called "man of Rio Salado" (15,000 years), the name then borne by the locality of El-Malah that we cross a few kilometers before the fork in the road to Aïn Temouchent. It is in El-Malah that Aroudj, one of the Barberousse brothers, died in 1518 after the siege of Tlemcen.Until the XIIIth century BC, the Phoenicians and then the Carthaginians frequented a trading post near the beach of Beni Saf, on the volcanic islet of Rachgoun (Cape Acra, Layella) and in Sufat, a Berber village whose location is now a suburb of Aïn Temouchent. It is this last village that the Romans chose in the first century BC to build fortifications around which Albulae ("the white one") soon developed, a prosperous city that lost its prestige five centuries later and was taken by the Vandals who came from the west. The arrival of the Byzantines and then an earthquake caused the city to disappear. The Arabs founded a new city, Ksar Ibn Sinane, which soon became Aïn Temouchent.