Abdellah Ben Salem Mosque

Built in 1880 as the Great Synagogue of Oran, this striking neo-Moorish building with its horseshoe arches and stripe-banded stonework was converted into the Abdellah Ben Salem Mosque in 1975. The architecture is one of the more curious in the city — a Moorish-revival synagogue rebadged as a mosque, with relatively little change to the exterior.

The mosque is active and busy at prayer times. The interior is open to Muslim worshippers; visitors of other faiths can usually appreciate the facade and the surrounding small square. It sits at the foot of the slope leading up to the city centre.

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The building opened in 1880 as the Great Synagogue of Oran — at the time the largest synagogue in North Africa, serving a Jewish community of around 30,000. When most of Oran's Jews left for France and Israel after 1962, the building was closed; in 1975 it reopened as a mosque, with the Stars of David on the facade replaced by Quranic inscriptions but the rest of the architecture left almost untouched.

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