Albert Camus Childhood Home

The apartment block at 93 Rue de Lyon (now Rue Belouizdad) in the Belouizdad neighbourhood is where Albert Camus lived from childhood until he left for France. There is no museum here — it is a private residential building — but a small plaque marks the door.

Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, partly on the strength of works deeply rooted in this neighbourhood: The Stranger, The Plague, The First Man (his unfinished autobiographical novel, found in the wreckage of the car crash that killed him in 1960). For readers of his work, the street and the neighbourhood give the books a concrete physical context that is worth seeking out.

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A story
Camus spent his childhood in a two-room apartment in Belcourt — shared with his widowed mother, grandmother, uncle, and brother — with no running water and almost no furniture. He later wrote about the poverty of that life without bitterness, describing the sensory richness that compensated for it: the heat, the smell of the sea, the light. That light is still the defining characteristic of Algiers.

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