Abbaye Notre-Dame de l'Atlas

The Trappist monastery of Notre-Dame de l'Atlas sits in Tibhirine, roughly 90 kilometres south of Algiers, at about 1,100 metres in the Atlas Mountains of Médéa province. Founded during the French colonial period, the community lived in deliberate simplicity alongside their Muslim neighbours, sharing a garden and sustaining unusually close interfaith ties across decades. In March 1996, at the height of the Algerian Civil War, seven monks were abducted; their severed heads were discovered two months later. The martyrdom — depicted in Xavier Beauvois's 2010 film *Of Gods and Men* — led to the monks' beatification by Pope Francis in 2018. The monastery has remained largely abandoned since, a remote and sobering place of pilgrimage high in the mountains rather than a conventional tourist destination.