Scientific event

Places serve as witnesses to both joyful and painful events—locations that, over time, evolve into tourist routes where visitors come to appreciate the past and discover the heritage of previous nations. While tourism is typically associated with places that bring joy and pleasure, today we explore a different facet known as Dark Tourism. This form of tourism is linked to sites marked by violence, torture, and suffering.
In Algeria, we possess numerous sites that bear witness to a dark era of French colonialism, embodying some of the most brutal forms of injustice and human rights violations in history. Through this seminar, we aim to review several locations in Oran that served as centers for torture and interrogation. Our goal is to establish educational tourist routes that breathe life into forgotten memories and uncover the immense suffering endured by Algeria’s martyrs and moudjahidine.

Places hold a form of memory in their relationship with humanity; sometimes they evoke happy memories, while at others, they express profound pain and sorrow. These emotions can transcend the individual to encompass the memory of an entire nation, embodying the depth of tragedies associated with a specific time and place.
This scientific seminar seeks to approach a vital aspect of this collective memory: the detention centers and torture chambers of the colonial era, particularly during the Liberation Revolution. This endeavor requires shifting these sites from a purely historical perspective—often charged with tragedies people wish to forget—toward a tourism perspective. In this context, connecting with a painful past can enrich national pride and honor the sacrifices of the nation's martyrs and moudjahidine, making these sites living witnesses to a pivotal era in Algerian history.
In this seminar, we also highlight the forts and towers of Oran to revive the national and local memory of these landmarks. Our goal is to integrate them into the daily lives of citizens, especially the youth who are eager to travel through time and connect with historical events. This meeting relies on presenting historical studies and oral testimonies that link us to the reality of these monuments. If we consider that historical sites live and breathe through their activation by civil society and public bodies as tourist spaces, neglecting them risks the loss of memory regarding the atrocities of French colonial crimes.
These sites constitute historical tourist landmarks that can be integrated into promotional circuits in Oran and beyond. They serve as a global hallmark of revolutionary struggle that must be preserved. Furthermore, they can be utilized as a significant resource for exposing colonial crimes against humanity and as a pedagogical path for students, tourists, and the media.