Tlemcen, la perle du moyen maghreb

Monograph of the town of Tlemcen "It is the city of the beautiful riders, the air and water"

Located at the crossroads of the roads which carried out of Morocco to Algeria and the Mediterranean to the Sahara.

Tlemcen had a considerable commercial role. In 1248, it formed a Berber kingdom, independent of the empire of the almohades and became the capital of the kingdom abdelwadide which extended to the XIV ^E  century with most of current Algeria. Tlemcen which, already to the XII ^E  century was a religious center, became an Islamic hearth of culture then. To the XVI ^E  century, it passed under the sovereignty of the Spanish governor of Oran then, under the domination D' Arudj Barberousse and finally from the Turks in 1553.

This capital mystic of the West oranais was regarded a long time as "Jerusalem of the Maghreb" because the Moslems and Israélites kept their holy places there.

The mosque of Sidi Bou Médine which  was built to the XIV ^E  century by a sultan of Fès, the "black sultan", of pure hispano-mauresque style, as in Fès or Grenade. The minaret is decorated polychrome bricks and ceramics.

Bou Medine was called actually Chaïb Ibn Hussein El Andalousi, because it had been born in Seville, Ibn Chaib taught successively in Baghdad, Seville, Cordoue and, finally in Bougie, it was of an intelligence out of the commun run.

Tlemcéniens made him imposing funerals and even buried it at the place of which he had said: "Which place favourable with the sleep".

If the Arab presence, carrying the Islamic faith and Eastern civilization to the Berber populations autochtones, goes up only to the VIII ^E  century, the origin of the Jewish communities in North Africa was noted more than ten centuries before Jesus-Christ, and their colonies were already numerous under the Roman occupation, initially on the littoral then in the interior of the country.

Lontemps, the Jews did not have the right to reside inside the walls of the City. It is only in 1393, thanks to the merits of the rabbi Ephraïm Enkaoua, whom they were authorized to cross the ramparts. They lived there in closed mud, in the mellah (ghetto) until the arrival of the French, but they always remained attached to the Arab language.

Of all the cities of the West oranais, Tlemcen is that which was penetrated by Spanish immigration. The limit of this Iberian exodus of the medium of the XIX ^E  century seems to have been the area of  Rio salado, Sidi - Beautiful - Abbès and Beni - Saf.

Djéma el Kébir, the large mosque, built to the XII ^E  century, extraordinarily stripped, modern of lines.

However, the Andalusian influence, to Tlemcen, goes back to the XV ^E  century, when the reconquest directed and completed by the catholic kings made ebb on North Africa Moros who are at the origin of these Andalusian communities that one finds of Fès with Bizerte and which kept, with the keys of their given up houses with Grenade or Malaga, their musical and poetic folklore.

There is also, on the road of Morocco, the imposing ruins of Mansourah the Victorious one, this provisional metropolis

altitude (more than 800 m) but sunny succeeded one early spring which made hatch, as of February, the flowers of cherry trees and the pêchers. It is then celebrates it festival of the cherries which brought to Tlemcen of tens of thousands of visitors