Cherchell

Cherchell is a city of the Algérie located at approximately 90km in the west of Algiers. It shelters the largest military academy interarmes of Africa, in addition to the two museums dedicated to the Roman vestiges left in the city (amphitheater, statues Roman, mosaic, architectural monuments, etc…). The city constitutes an increasingly important tourist pole in the country, with its fishing port, its beaches and its infrastructures under development; it is also characterized by its many artists, who perpetuate the tradition of the arabo-Andalusian music through an academy dedicated for this purpose.

Antiquity

Césarée de Maurétanie , current Cherchell, was one of the most important cities of the Western littoral of the ancient North Africa, particularly with the Roman epoch. The city is founded with the IV {{E}} century before our era by the Phéniciens under the name Iol or Jol . Initially integrated into the kingdom of Numidie, Iol passes under the control of the Maurétanie after the fall of Jugurtha into 105 before our era. The city is refondée in 25 av. J-C by Juba II, under the name of Césarée of Mauritania ( Caesarea Mauretaniae ). It becomes after 40 the capital of the Roman province of Maurétanie Césarienne, which extends to the Atlantic Ocean.

Juba II made its capital a city important, surrounded by an enclosure and designed according to the principles of town planning hellénistico-Roman. Its statues of the hellenistic types of an exceptional quality and the mosaics of its houses - later - expressed the opulence of the leading layer. Ruins of temples and monuments Roman testify to this period.

The city which Juba II built was surrounded by an enclosure which was one of vastest of the Roman world : a continuous wall of 4460 m, perhaps supplemented by a rampart of sea, surrounded 370 ha. Only the northern part of space thus delimited, i.e. the broad littoral plate at this place from 4 to 500 m, was actually built. For reasons combining of the strategic needs and especially, it, an ostentatious will seems , the southern rampart had been built at an altitude close to 200m on the edge of the plate which dominates the city and a whole amphitheater of hills was included in the enclosure. These characters bring closer the enclosure to Césarée of those of the hellenistic cities and it is only because it seemed incredible which Auguste made it possible an indigenous king to obtain such an instrument of power that one a long time refused to allot to Juba II the first construction of this enclosure .

Césarée was equipped by its king with the public edifices which became characteristic of the Roman city. Its theater is, with that of Utique, then capital of the province of Africa, oldest of North Africa and one of oldest of the Western Mediterranean; it is contemporary Théâtre of Marcellus in Rome. Its Amphithéâtre is built according to a particular plan driven by the desire to have an enough vast building to give spectacles of combat of deer or groups of Gladiator S.

Modern history

The 21 and October 22nd 1942, the Conférence of Cherchell put in presence the American general Clark and the persons in charge of the resistance in Algeria to prepare the Opération Torch .

A school of pupil-officers (which was post-war period comparable with Saint-Cyr military school) there was created in 1942 by the French Army to replace the schools of the metropolis then occupied during the second world war. It forms since independence the executives of the Algerian Armée.

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