Algeria is home to 36 million people, but it occupies nearly a million square miles, by far the largest nation in all of Africa, four times the size of Texas. It is a sparsely populated country, especially outside the main cities. Many Algerians are huddled in large urban areas like Algiers, which has a population approaching four million.

So Algeria is primarily a land of vast deserts, a Sahara nation that offers far-flung views of cities, vast tracts of land with few people but plenty of sky. The coast is wonderfully fertile and well watered, a magnificent country that was once the granary of ancient Rome. In many ways it has the characteristics that would be instantly familiar to Californians cultivating that fertile state: a seaward plain leading inland to a wall of mountains that tend to keep the plain well watered by blocking moisture from the ocean so that do not travel over the mountains. . This is the same geo-climatological configuration along the southern Mediterranean coast and the California coast.

The great Christian philosopher Saint Augustine was bishop of Hippo Regius, an ancient city whose modern name is Annaba, Algeria. The ruins of Hippo Regius bring me back year after year, decade after decade. I feel, somehow, that the soul of the Mediterranean is hidden among these ancient stone blocks. They smell like Rome when it entered the Christian era and are among the best in all of North Africa, making it worth a special trip. We can see why this land was populated three thousand years ago with rich and undulating hills covered with flowers, olive groves, rosemary beds, home to shepherds and their flocks whose days are enlivened by the singing of birds.

At the height of its activity a couple of millennia ago, the city of Hippo was considered part of Roman Africa, a kind of vassal of the great city of Carthage in present-day Tunisia. Today Hippo Regius is part of Algeria, although not far from the Tunisian border. Saint Augustine was ordained a priest there in 391. He became a coadjutor bishop in 395, and then a bishop a few years later, a position he held for nearly three decades until his death in 430.

The best way to see the old town is by approaching it from the promenade, which today is about three hundred meters away from where it used to be when the Romans walked these beaches and trails. Walk from the Mediterranean Sea up the small hill to the well-kept Hippo Museum before touring the ruins, as the exhibits there will help put what you see in the right context – an investment worth making. For example, the ground floor contains a good collection of sculptures in the Busts room, including a statute of Emperor Vespasian found in the forum. A special gift for me is a very strange piece of armor, almost six feet tall, covered in a cloak of blood red. On the wall is a meticulously detailed mosaic of four sea nymphs or water spirits.

There is another collection of fine mosaics in the next room, my favorite being a hunting party from the Saint Augustine era in which lions, leopards and antelope are chased in a trap. We easily forget that lions were not limited to Kenya and East Africa in those days. They were common as far north as Hippo Regius. Only the Mediterranean Sea prevented lions from roaming Sicily and Italy. A third mosaic scene, this one of fishermen bringing home their catch, includes what I consider to be the equivalent of an old postcard showing Hippo Regius as he must have appeared two thousand years ago.

The ruins of the ancient city occupy many acres of land. You will see that the best houses and the best residential area of ​​the city, in those days as in a modern city, were right on the ocean where the sea breeze swept its open courtyards. What remains of half a dozen Roman villas of the wealthy is evident here, their courtyards punctuated by columns, some of the walls and floors still visible.

Two houses that are especially worth seeing are the Villa del Laberinto and the Villa del Procurador, which seem to me to be the most impressive examples of how the rich organized their private houses. Beyond these oceanfront villas, if you continue past the southern baths, where you will reach the edge of the Christian Quarter and the 150-foot outline of the great basilica of the early Christian period, where Augustine likely had the court as bishop. The floor tiles are quite nice.

No modern visitor to Algeria should pass up the opportunity to visit Hippo Regius and pay homage to this vision of the past.