Prayer Times in Annaba, Algeria Today

The earliest prayers in Algeria, by more than half an hour

Annaba lies at about 36.90 degrees north and 7.77 degrees east, near the eastern end of the Algerian coast. It is the easternmost city on the country's list, which makes it the first place in Algeria the sun reaches each morning and the first to reach Maghrib each evening.

The margin is larger than most people expect. Tlemcen, at the opposite corner of the country, sits at 1.31 degrees west — a little over nine degrees of longitude away, and some 800 kilometres in a straight line. At four minutes of solar time to the degree, that works out at roughly thirty-six minutes. Both cities keep UTC+1, with no daylight saving anywhere in Algeria, so none of that gap is a clock artefact. When the call to Maghrib goes out in Annaba, Tlemcen still has more than half an hour of daylight.

Across the Tunisian border, the same clock and a different Isha

Tunisia lies a short distance east and keeps the same UTC+1 clock, so crossing the border changes nothing about the time of day. What it does change is the convention behind the timetable.

Algeria's Ministry of Religious Affairs sets Fajr at 18 degrees of solar depression and Isha at 17. Tunisia's ministry uses 18 for both. The result is that an Algerian and a Tunisian table computed for the very same spot would agree at Fajr and differ at Isha, purely because the two authorities have settled on different nightfall angles. Add the longitude difference — Tunis is further east and its prayers fall around ten minutes before Annaba's — and a table picked up across the border is wrong here in two separate ways. The Algeria prayer times hub covers the national parameters in full.

Asr, sunrise, and two entries that get confused

Asr in this table follows the Maliki threshold used throughout Algeria: the window opens once a vertical object's shadow has grown by one further object-height beyond its shortest measure at midday. Hanafi reckoning waits for a second such length and produces an Asr roughly forty to sixty minutes later, which is the usual explanation when a phone disagrees with a nearby mosque by close to an hour in the afternoon.

The sunrise entry is a different kind of thing altogether. It is not a prayer and nothing is due when it arrives; it is published because it closes the window in which Fajr may still be prayed. Every Ramadan it is taken for the start of the fast, which is Fajr's role, and with an 18-degree dawn angle the two are not close together.

Hippo Regius, and a very long record of settlement

Annaba stands beside the ruins of Hippo Regius, one of the significant cities of Roman North Africa, and the hill above the modern town carries the basilica named for Augustine, who was bishop here. The city has been continuously occupied through every period since.

None of that alters the arithmetic on this page, and it is worth saying so directly. The times above are astronomical, generated from the city's coordinates for the current date. They do not depend on which buildings stand, and they are the same at every mosque in the wilaya. Where congregations differ is in the interval they keep between the adhan and the iqama, which is a local decision.

The northernmost point on Algeria's timetable

At 36.90 degrees north, Annaba is the furthest north of the Algerian cities covered here, about two degrees above Tlemcen in the southwest. Latitude is what decides how much the length of the day changes through the year, so Annaba has the widest annual swing in the country — though the difference against the rest of Algeria is measured in minutes rather than hours.

In practice, daylight here runs from around nine and a half hours at the winter solstice to close to fourteen and a half at the summer one. Because Isha is fixed by an angle rather than by a set interval after sunset, the evening gap between Maghrib and Isha also stretches through summer and closes in winter rather than holding steady.

Iftar on the eastern coast

The fast runs from Fajr to Maghrib, and both boundaries move steadily over the thirty days of Ramadan. Consulting the monthly view once at the start is more reliable than reading a single day and assuming it represents the month.

The local hazard is a familiar one. National broadcasts and widely shared timetables are frequently produced for Algiers, which is about nineteen minutes behind Annaba. Following them here would mean holding the fast nearly twenty minutes past the actual Maghrib every evening. Mosques also commonly call an imsak a few minutes before the calculated Fajr as a precaution; this page gives the astronomical figure and leaves that margin to you.

Friday, the qibla, and other pages

Jumu'ah replaces Dhuhr for those attending and is timed from the Dhuhr entry above. Sermon length and the interval before the congregation stands belong to each imam and mosque. Anyone praying at home does Dhuhr at the listed time as normal.

For the direction of prayer, use the Qibla direction tool, which resolves the bearing from your own coordinates rather than from a remembered one — a sensible precaution in a city this far from the rest of the country. Ramadan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar, and Arabic Annaba prayer times carry the same table. For comparison, see Constantine prayer times inland and Oran prayer times at the western end of the coast.