Oran

Oran is a port city in northwestern Algeria, on a bay of the Mediterranean below Mount Murdjadjo. The city is known as the birthplace of raï, the popular music of western Algeria sung by artists such as Cheb Khaled and Cheb Hasni. The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent was born in Oran and spent his childhood there.

Andalusian traders from Spain founded the town in 903 as a trading port for the commerce between al-Andalus and the cities of the Maghreb. Spain held the port for most of the time from the early 16th to the late 18th century and built a ring of forts on the heights around it. The Ottoman beys of the west then made it their capital and built mosques and baths. France took the city in 1831, and under French rule it grew into a port for the wine, cereals and citrus of the plains behind it, with boulevards, theaters and a new cathedral.

The Port of Oran handles cereals, containers and building materials and runs passenger ferries to Alicante and Marseille. The Arzew gas port, east of the city on the same coast, ships liquefied natural gas to Europe. Oran hosted the Mediterranean Games in the 2020s, for which the city built a new sports complex and an Olympic stadium.

Santa Cruz Fort, built by the Spanish on the summit of Mount Murdjadjo, looks over the bay, and a chapel of the Virgin stands beside it. The Pasha Mosque, built in the late 18th century under the Ottomans, has an octagonal minaret. The Front de Mer, a long promenade above the port, was laid out in the French period with a view across the harbor. MC Oran, founded in the 1940s, won the Algerian football championship several times and the Arab Cup Winners' Cup in the 1990s.