The town is particularly notable for its power plant and accompanying desalination unit.[2] A fishing port recently built there, originally scheduled to open in 2007, became fully operational only in 2016 due to problems with sand accumulation.[3]
After the Punic Wars, it fell under Roman control. Its name was Latinized as Cissi and it was placed into the province of Mauretania Caesariensis. It appeared on the Tabula Peutingeriana.[7] The ruins of a 4th or 5th-century Christian church could still be easily distinguished at Cape Djinet up to the 19th century, but little trace now remains.[7]
After 484, it disappears from written sources for several centuries, including the 7th-8th century Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, only to reappear in the 11th century work of al-Idrisi under the new name of Jannād, after a Berber tribe then living in the area.[8] It was known to medieval European geographers as Berengereto. By the 18th century, Djinet was a small port town serving the farmers of the surrounding lowlands, described by Thomas Shaw in the following terms:
...we come to the little port of Jinnett, from which a great quantity of grain is shipped off yearly to Christendom. Jinnett is a small creek, with tolerably good anchoring grounds before it; and was probably Edrisi's Mers' el Dajaje, or Port of Hens. I was told that Jinnett, or Paradise, was given to this place, on account of a row-boat, which was once very providentially conducted within the creek, when the mariners expected every moment to have perished upon the neighbouring rocks.[9]
The area was conquered by France in 1837 in the wake of the First Battle of the Issers, and remained under French rule until Algeria's independence in 1962.
In 1986, a gas-powered thermal power plant was commissioned at Djinet, manufactured by Siemens with a capacity of 704 MW.[10]
At a Conference of Carthage (411) between Catholic and schismatic Donatist bishops, where their heresy was condemned as such, Cissi was represented only by a Donatist bishop named Flavosus. The Latin adjective referring to Cissi, Cissitanus, is applied to him in the account of that conference. In the 19th century, Morcelli took the adjective Cessitanus to refer to Cissi, and supposed instead that the name of the Cissi bishop at the conference was Quodvultdeus, whom Ferron rather attributed to the see of Cissita,[7][11] which was in Africa Proconsularis and presently in Tunisia (Sidi-Tabet?).
Djinet is connected to the rest of the country through a single main road: RN 24, a coastal road leading to Algiers in the west (via Zemmouri) and Bejaia in the east (via Dellys).[13]
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