Tipaza is a Phoenician-Roman archaeological site on the Mediterranean coast of central Algeria, seventy kilometres west of Algiers at the foot of the Chenoua massif. The pre-Roman settlement was a small Phoenician trading post of the sixth or fifth century BCE, set on the broader Numidian-Mauretanian Berber coast that the Phoenicians used as a long-distance trading interface; the site was elevated to colonial status under the early Roman empire and developed into one of the principal cities of Mauretania Caesariensis.
The Roman city occupies a coastal plateau of approximately fifty hectares, with a forum, a Capitoline temple, public baths, an amphitheatre, and three Christian basilicas of the late fourth to sixth centuries. Tipaza was a substantial Christian centre under Augustine's contemporaries, with a continuing population through the Vandal and Byzantine periods before its decline in the late seventh century after the Arab conquest. The "Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania" — a circular dry-stone monument approximately eleven kilometres east — is conventionally attributed to Juba II and Cleopatra Selene, although the dating is contested.
Tipaza was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1982. The combined coastal-archaeological landscape — the Roman urban plan, the Christian basilicas, and the Royal Mausoleum — constitutes one of the most extensive surviving Mauretanian-Roman complexes in north Africa. The site is widely accessible from Algiers as a day-trip destination and is a continuing pilgrimage point for the readership of Albert Camus, whose 1938 essay "Noces à Tipasa" gave the site its principal twentieth-century literary association.
The contemporary town of Tipaza, adjacent to the antique site, is a coastal resort and administrative centre of Tipaza wilaya. The Mauretanian-Roman material culture of the region — funerary inscriptions, mosaics, sculpture — is housed both at the site museum and at the Bardo and Algerian National museums in Algiers.