Twelve North African Cities from the Atlantic Coast to Cyrenaica

Safi came under Portuguese control in 1488 and held it until 1541, and American forces landed here on 8 November 1942 as part of Operation Blackstone within Operation Torch. Today it is Morocco's principal sardine port, and an OCP Group chemical complex has made it a center of phosphate processing since 1965.

Farther up the Atlantic coast, El Jadida began as the Portuguese fortified town of Mazagan, with star-shaped walls designed against Renaissance siege technology. It stayed Portuguese until 1769 and was renamed al-Jadida, the New, in 1820; its historic core became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004.

Salé faces Rabat across the Bou Regreg river. Founded as a medieval merchant port in the eleventh century, it became a seventeenth-century pirate haven whose Sale Rovers formed an independent corsair republic, and it keeps Marinid buildings such as its Great Mosque and the Madrasa of Abu al-Hasan.

Kenitra sits at the mouth of the Sebou River. The French developed it in 1912 as the military and river port of Port Lyautey, and it took its present name after independence in 1956; a United States Naval Air Station operated here during the Cold War.

Crossing into Algeria, Tlemcen was a Zayyanid center from 1236 to 1554 that tied trans-Saharan trade routes to Mediterranean commerce. It is still known for its Andalusian cultural heritage and for leather, carpet and textile industries.

Blida, the City of Roses, lies at the base of the Tell Atlas on the fertile Mitidja Plain, about 45 kilometers southwest of Algiers. A destructive earthquake in March 1825 led to its rebuilding on a grid plan, and France developed it from 1839.

Tizi Ouzou was founded in 1856 after a French military expedition against Kabyle tribes. It is the capital of Tizi Ouzou Province in the Kabylia region, nicknamed the Capital of Djurdjura, and is home to Mouloud Mammeri University.

Batna stands in the Aures Mountains at 1,048 meters and is regarded as the capital of the Aures region. The war of independence began on 1 November 1954 with an attack on its barracks, and its position gives a natural passage through the mountains to the Sahara.

Skikda was the Roman port of Rusicade, which held the largest Roman theatre in Algeria. The modern city was founded by the French in 1838 as Philippeville to serve Constantine, and since the 1970s it has been a major site for gas, refining and liquefied natural gas production.

In Tunisia, Bizerte is the northernmost city in Africa and a major Mediterranean naval harbor. It remained under French military occupation after independence, after a 1961 conflict, and became the last Tunisian town returned to full sovereignty in October 1963.

Gabès was the Carthaginian and Roman Tacapae, an oasis on the Mediterranean coast revived after the seventh-century Arab conquest. French administration between 1881 and 1955 brought railways and port works, and in the Second World War it served as headquarters for the German Afrika Korps until its recapture in 1943.

The route ends at Derna on the Cyrenaican coast of Libya, seat of a wealthy Barbary State province and site of the 1805 Battle of Derna, the first United States military victory on foreign soil. In September 2023 the collapse of two dams during Storm Daniel destroyed roughly a quarter of the city.