Beni Hammad Fort

Al Qal'a of Beni Hammad is the ruined first capital of the Hammadid dynasty, founded in the Hodna mountains early in the eleventh century and abandoned within a century under Hilalian pressure. Seven kilometres of wall enclose a mosque whose prayer hall of thirteen aisles makes it one of the largest in Algeria, second only to Mansourah at Tlemcen. Its square minaret still stands almost twenty-five metres high, its ornament banded into three vertical registers that the Giralda in Seville later echoed. Five palaces have been excavated, among them the Lake Palace with a basin sixty-seven metres long. Stucco fragments here carry some of the earliest muqarnas in the Islamic west.