The city’s most prominent monument – you will see its twin 107m high minarets as you approach the centre – is the Mosque of Emir Abdelkader. The project started in 1968 as a desire to build a mosque capable of accommodating 10,000 in its prayer hall, but when the then president Houari Boumediène became involved, it grew into the current, ambitious building: one of the world’s largest mosques and Algeria’s first modern Islamic university.