Algeria covers 2,381,741 km² (919,595 sq mi), which makes it the largest country in Africa and the tenth-largest in the world, as well as the largest in the Arab world and around the Mediterranean. It is about 3.7 times the size of France, roughly 3.4 times the size of Texas and more than five times the size of neighbouring Morocco. More than 80% of that area is desert, so Algeria’s 47 million people live at an average of only about 20 per km², and most of them are packed into a narrow coastal strip in the north.
Tenth in the World, First in Africa Since 2011
On the world list Algeria sits between two Asian and African giants. Just above it, in ninth place, is Kazakhstan with 2,724,910 km²; just below, in eleventh, is the Democratic Republic of the Congo with 2,344,858 km², a gap of only about 37,000 km², less than the area of Switzerland or the Netherlands. Saudi Arabia, at 2,149,690 km², follows in twelfth place.
Algeria has not always held the African title. Until 2011 the largest country on the continent was Sudan. When South Sudan became independent after its referendum that year, Sudan lost about a quarter of its territory: today’s Sudan covers 1,878,000 km² and South Sudan 644,329 km², which together would come to about 2.52 million km², larger than Algeria. The split moved Algeria to first place without a single change to its own borders. The full story of that shift is in our comparison Is Algeria bigger than Sudan?
Algeria Beside France, Texas and Its Maghreb Neighbours
Against better-known places, the figure looks like this:
- France (643,801 km² including its overseas regions): Algeria is about 3.7 times larger, or about 4.3 times metropolitan France alone.
- France, Spain, Germany and Italy combined (about 1.81 million km²): Algeria is still larger by roughly 570,000 km².
- Texas (about 695,660 km²): Algeria is about 3.4 times larger.
- The United Kingdom (244,376 km²): almost ten times larger.
- Morocco (446,550 km², excluding Western Sahara): about 5.3 times larger.
- Tunisia (163,610 km²): about 14.6 times larger.
- Libya (1,759,540 km²), the next-largest country in North Africa: Algeria is about 35% bigger.
Alongside Greenland, which covers 2,166,086 km², Algeria is also the larger of the two, though maps drawn on the Mercator projection make Greenland look several times bigger because it lies so far north.
Between 19° and 37°N: The Outline on the Map
Algeria lies mostly between latitudes 19° and 37°N and longitudes 9°W and 12°E. That gives it a shape like a broad wedge: a Mediterranean frontage in the north, with Algiers, Oran, Constantine and Annaba on or near the coast, widening southwards into the open Sahara. The Hoggar Mountains, with the oasis city of Tamanrasset at their heart, lie about 1,500 km south of Algiers, yet the frontiers with Niger and Mali run farther south still, so a journey from the coast to the Hoggar crosses most of the country’s length without reaching its southern border.
Between the coast and the desert, the north is layered in parallel bands that run east–west. The Tell Atlas rises close to the sea; south of it the High Plateaus, steppe-like plains, stretch for more than 600 km eastward from the Moroccan border; and beyond them the higher Saharan Atlas, made up of the Ksour, Amour and Ouled-Naïl ranges, forms the last barrier before the sand. Streams running off its southern slopes vanish into the desert but feed a line of oases along its edge, of which Biskra, Laghouat and Béchar are the best known. In the north-east the two Atlas chains merge into the Aurès Mountains near the Tunisian border.
The land boundaries touch seven neighbours and, on the segment lengths given in Wikipedia’s Geography of Algeria, add up to more than 6,300 km: Morocco (1,559 km), Mali (1,376 km), Libya (982 km), Tunisia (965 km), Niger (956 km), Mauritania (463 km) and a 42 km stretch of Western Sahara, a territory whose status is disputed between Morocco and the Polisario Front. Across the Sahara most of these lines are straight surveyed segments rather than rivers or ridges; the Moroccan border, for instance, ends in a straight north–south line 116 km long down to the Western Sahara tripoint.
More Than 80% Desert: The Algerian Sahara
The Algerian Sahara begins south of the Saharan Atlas and runs for about 1,500 km to the Niger and Mali frontiers. It is not all sand. Ergs, or seas of dunes, cover roughly a quarter of the desert. The two biggest are the Erg Chech in the south-west, about 206,000 km² in all, which extends across the border into Mali and Mauritania, and the Grand Erg Oriental in the north-east, about 185,000 km², whose edge spills some 30,000 km² into Tunisia. Much of the rest is hamada, bare rocky plateau, and almost the entire south-eastern quarter of the country is taken up by the high Ahaggar (Hoggar) massif and the sandstone Tassili n’Ajjer.
The Tassili n’Ajjer plateau alone covers more than 72,000 km², reaching 2,158 m at Adrar Afao, with the towns of Djanet and Illizi on its edges. It holds one of the world’s most important collections of prehistoric rock art and was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1982. In the Hoggar, Mount Tahat rises to 3,003 m (9,852 ft), the highest point in Algeria, about 56 km north of Tamanrasset. To see how this one country’s desert fits into the whole, read how big the Sahara Desert is.
47 Million People on 12% of the Land
Size and population pull in opposite directions in Algeria. With just over 47 million people across 2.38 million km², the national density is about 20 people per km². According to the country’s demographic data, 91% of Algerians live along the Mediterranean coast on just 12% of the land, and about 75% of the population is urban.
The heartland is the Tell, the hills, coastal plains and valleys between the sea and the Tell Atlas. The Mitidja Plain behind Algiers, once a malarial swamp, is among the most productive farmland in the country, and Algiers itself had an estimated 4.3 million people in 2025. South of the Tell, the High Plateaus sit between about 400 and 1,300 m above sea level and are dry enough to be thought of as almost Saharan. In the far south, Tamanrasset, the chief town of the Hoggar, had an estimated 141,000 people in 2025, a large city by Saharan standards.
How the Borders Grew: From Lalla Maghnia (1845) to the Sand War (1963)
Before the French conquest, the territory’s limits were loose. The Regency of Algiers, established in 1516 and owing nominal allegiance to the Ottoman Empire, was a major Mediterranean power for nearly three centuries, but its border with Morocco was vague, and Morocco maintained a traditional, though often weakly enforced, claim to large areas of north-west Africa.
Algeria’s present size is the product of the colonial period. France invaded in 1830, occupied much of the northern coast between 1830 and 1847 and formally annexed the territory in 1848. The Treaty of Lalla Maghnia of 18 March 1845 set the first border between French Algeria and Morocco, but it was delimited over only 165 km inland from the Mediterranean; beyond that the treaty declared that a land without water needed no boundary. Protocols signed in 1901 and 1902 pushed the line south to Figuig, still only loosely.
The deep south was taken by force. In 1902 a French column under Lieutenant Gaston-Ernest Cottenest entered the Hoggar and defeated the Ahaggar Tuareg at the Battle of Tit, and the conquest of the territory was not complete until 1903. French rule was marked by violent conquest and mass European settlement, and by around 1870 the indigenous population had fallen by up to a third through warfare, disease and starvation. When Algeria won independence in 1962 after an eight-year war, it kept the Sahara along with the north, although under the Évian Accords France retained mining and oil interests there and facilities for underground nuclear testing for a period.
The western edge was then fought over. In the Sand War of 25 September to 30 October 1963, Moroccan and Algerian forces clashed over Morocco’s claim to parts of the Tindouf and Béchar regions. A treaty of 15 June 1972 demarcated the entire Algeria–Morocco border for the first time; Algeria ratified it in 1973, while Morocco did not ratify it until 1989 or 1992, depending on the source. The border has been closed to travel since 1994.
From 48 to 69 Wilayas
Running a country this big has led Algeria to keep subdividing it. The number of provinces, or wilayas, was fixed at 48 in 1984. On 26 November 2019 the cabinet approved ten new provinces, created by splitting the largest provinces of the south, among them Timimoun, In Salah, Touggourt and Djanet, which took effect on 18 December 2019 and made 58. On 16 November 2025 eleven more were announced in the High Plateaus and the south, among them Aflou, Barika, Boussaâda, El Kantara and El Aricha, bringing the total to 69 wilayas divided into 1,541 municipalities. Each new map has made the old giant provinces such as Tamanrasset smaller, but the country they add up to is unchanged at 2,381,741 km², and its seven frontiers are traced one by one in Algeria’s neighbours and borders.