The main square of central Skikda — formerly the heart of French Philippeville — is the natural starting point for exploring the old colonial town. The surrounding streets follow the orderly grid that French military engineers laid out from 1838 onwards, and the arcade-fronted buildings that line them have the same bone structure as a Languedoc market town, weathered and adapted to North African light.
The City Hall on the square is a neo-Moorish palace with a hybrid character that sits somewhere between French official architecture and Orientalist fantasy — Skikda has one of the rare buildings in Algeria credited, at least in local tradition, to the influence of Le Corbusier's early career in the region, though the attribution is contested. The square itself is busy in the evening, when families come out for the paseo that Algerian cities inherited from the French.