Few names echo through ancient history as loudly as Carthage. Here, facing the blue of the Gulf of Tunis, stood the city founded by the Phoenicians that came to dominate trade in the western Mediterranean. It was the homeland of the general Hannibal, who very nearly brought Rome to its knees, and the protagonist of the three Punic Wars, which ended with its total destruction in 146 BC. Walking through its ruins means treading the stage of one of the great duels of antiquity.
But Carthage did not die with the Punic defeat. Rome refounded it as a colony and turned it into one of the largest and richest cities of the Empire, capital of the province of Africa, with colossal baths, theatres, amphitheatres and villas covered in mosaics. Later it became a major centre of early Christianity, the city of Saint Augustine and of famous martyrs, before falling to the Vandals, the Byzantines and finally the Arabs. All these layers now sit side by side in a site spread across hills and gardens overlooking the sea.
This guide takes a practical look at Carthage: what the combined ticket includes and how to make the most of it, what to see on Byrsa Hill and at the spectacular Antonine Baths, how to get there on the historic TGM train from Tunis, how to pair it with the blue-and-white village of Sidi Bou Said in a single day, and what to picture among the stones. Carthage rewards travellers who love history: every hill holds a chapter of the clash between two civilisations that decided the course of the West.
Carthage was founded by Phoenician settlers from the city of Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) around 814 BC, according to tradition by Queen Dido (Elissa). Its name, Qart Hadasht, meant 'new city'. Thanks to its strategic position and its commercial and naval skill, it became the great power of the western Mediterranean, with colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands and Iberia. Its clash with the rising power of Rome led to the three Punic Wars (264-146 BC). In the second, the general Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants and humiliated Rome at Cannae, but he was eventually defeated. In the third, Rome besieged and razed Carthage in 146 BC, killing or enslaving its population. A century later, Julius Caesar and Augustus refounded it as a Roman colony, and Carthage was reborn as capital of the province of Africa and one of the largest cities of the Empire, with baths, theatres and mosaic-filled villas. It then became a centre of Christianity (the city of Saint Augustine and Saint Cyprian). It fell to the Vandals in 439, was retaken by the Byzantines in 533 and was finally destroyed by the Arabs around 698. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and symbolic heart of the country: the capital with its centuries-old medina and the Bardo Museum, the ruins of legendary Carthage overlooking the gulf, the blue and white of Sidi Bou Said, and the green northern coast between Hammamet and Tabarka.
Read the history of Tunis and the north →They depart from Sidi Bou Said, 3 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Carthage begins with a voyage across the Mediterranean and with one of the most famous founding legends of the ancient world. Around 814 BC, according to tradition, Phoenician settlers from the city of Tyre, on the coast of present-day Lebanon, founded a colony on the Gulf of Tunis that they called Qart Hadasht, which in their Semitic language meant 'new city'. Through Greek and Latin, that name would eventually become Carthage.
The Phoenicians were the great seafaring and trading people of the eastern Mediterranean, inventors of the alphabet and masters of the sea. From their city-states (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos) they had dotted the coasts with trading posts. Carthage stood on an easily defended peninsula, with two natural harbours, at the point where the Mediterranean narrows between Africa and Sicily. It was destined to outshine them all.
The legend, recorded centuries later by authors such as Virgil in the 'Aeneid', credits the founding to the Tyrian princess Elissa, better known as Dido. Fleeing her brother Pygmalion, who had murdered her husband to seize his wealth, Dido reached the African coast with a group of followers. She asked the local king for as much land as an ox hide could cover. Cleverly, she cut the hide into very thin strips and used them to encircle an entire hill: Byrsa (from the Greek word for 'hide'), the heart of the future city. Virgil would add the tragic love affair between Dido and the Trojan hero Aeneas, and the queen's suicide when he abandoned her, a tale that mythically linked the origins of Carthage and Rome, the two future rivals.
Over the following centuries, Carthage grew from a simple colony into the leading power of the western Mediterranean. As its mother city, Tyre, fell under the empires of the East (the Assyrians, the Babylonians and finally the Persians), Carthage took over and became the head of a vast commercial and colonial network. The Greeks and Romans called the Carthaginians 'Punic' (from 'poeni', Phoenicians).
Its power rested on the sea. Carthage built a thalassocracy, a dominion based on control of the sea, with a mighty fleet and legendary harbours: a commercial port and, behind it, a circular military harbour hidden from view that could hold more than a hundred warships. Its merchants sailed the whole Mediterranean and ventured into the Atlantic. The navigator Hanno explored the Atlantic coast of Africa, and others reached the tin routes towards northern Europe.
Carthage controlled or influenced Sardinia, western Sicily, the Balearic Islands, the south of the Iberian Peninsula and much of the North African coast. From its colonies and trading partners it obtained silver, tin, gold, slaves, ivory and grain. The city grew enormously rich: it came to have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, colossal walls, multi-storey neighbourhoods, temples and an intense religious life devoted to deities such as Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit.
This grip on the western Mediterranean first clashed with the Greek cities of Sicily, in wars that dragged on for generations. But the great rival was rising on the other side of the Strait of Sicily: an expanding republic on the Italian peninsula that was starting to look towards the sea. Carthage and Rome were bound to collide.
The clash between Carthage and Rome led to three devastating wars, the Punic Wars (264-146 BC). They decided who would rule the western Mediterranean and, with it, the course of Western history.
The First Punic War (264-241 BC) broke out over control of Sicily. It was mostly a naval war. Rome had barely any fleet, so it built a navy from scratch and ended up defeating the mighty Carthaginian navy. Carthage lost Sicily and was left humiliated and in debt. To make up for its losses, the powerful Barca family expanded Carthaginian rule in the silver-rich Iberian Peninsula and founded Carthago Nova there (today's Cartagena).
The Second Punic War (218-201 BC) is the most famous, thanks to the towering figure of Hannibal Barca, one of the greatest military minds in history. Setting out from Iberia, Hannibal pulled off a legendary feat: he crossed the Pyrenees and then the Alps with his army and his war elephants, in the depths of winter, and took Italy by surprise. For years he humiliated the Roman legions on their own soil, with crushing victories such as Cannae (216 BC), considered a masterpiece of military tactics that is still studied today. But Hannibal never managed to take the city of Rome, and Rome carried the war to Africa. The Roman general Scipio Africanus finally defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama (202 BC), on Carthaginian soil. Carthage lost its territories, its fleet and its military independence.
The Third Punic War (149-146 BC) was the final blow. Rome feared a Carthaginian recovery. The senator Cato ended every speech by repeating 'Carthago delenda est' ('Carthage must be destroyed'). Rome looked for a pretext and laid siege to the city. After three years of desperate resistance, in 146 BC the Roman legions took Carthage house by house, in brutal fighting.
The fall of Carthage in 146 BC was one of the greatest disasters of the ancient world. After the final assault, the city was systematically looted and set on fire. According to ancient accounts, it burned for days. Most of the inhabitants who survived were sold into slavery, and Rome ordered the site destroyed completely. The legend that the Romans 'sowed the ground with salt' so nothing would grow again is probably a later addition, but it reflects the will to wipe Carthage off the face of the earth. The territory became the Roman province of Africa.
Even so, the location of Carthage was too valuable to stay abandoned forever. A century after destroying it, the Romans themselves decided to found it again. Julius Caesar planned a new colony on the site, and it was the emperor Augustus who, around 29 BC, made it a full Roman city: Colonia Julia Carthago.
Roman Carthage was reborn in extraordinary splendour and became one of the largest cities of the Empire. Many sources rank it second or third in the Roman West, after Rome and perhaps Alexandria. It was the capital of the wealthy province of Africa, the great granary that supplied the capital with wheat. The Romans built colossal baths such as the Antonine Baths, theatres, an amphitheatre, a circus, forums, temples, aqueducts that brought water from the Zaghouan mountains, and luxurious villas decorated with the mosaics that amaze visitors today at the Bardo Museum. Hannibal's city had, ironically, become a jewel of Roman civilisation.
In Roman times, Carthage also became one of the great centres of early Christianity and of Latin culture in Africa. Tertullian, one of the first great theologians writing in Latin, worked here. Saint Cyprian was bishop and martyr here in the 3rd century. And in the city's amphitheatre, around the year 203, Saints Perpetua and Felicity were martyred; their story is one of the oldest and most moving Christian texts. Nearby, in the city of Hippo, Saint Augustine would become bishop. He was the most influential intellectual figure of Western Christianity, and he had studied in Carthage itself.
The decline of the Western Roman Empire dragged Carthage down with it. In 439, the Vandals, a Germanic people who had crossed Hispania and then sailed to Africa, conquered the city and made it the capital of their kingdom. From Carthage, the Vandals dominated the western Mediterranean with their fleet and even sacked Rome itself in 455.
A century later, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) took the city back. In 533, the general Belisarius, sent by the emperor Justinian, defeated the Vandals and brought Carthage back into the Roman-Byzantine world. The city enjoyed a final period of splendour as capital of the Byzantine province of Africa, with new churches and fortifications.
But the world was changing again, and an unstoppable force was coming from the East that within a few decades would transform all of North Africa: the expansion of Islam.
Ancient Carthage came to its final end with the Muslim conquest of North Africa. The Arab armies, which had already founded Kairouan as their inland base, took the city around 698. Unlike other conquered cities, Carthage was not absorbed or rebuilt as a major centre. The Arabs chose to develop the better-protected Tunis, a few kilometres away, and Carthage gradually emptied. For centuries its majestic ruins served as a quarry: marble and columns from the ancient city were reused in the Zitouna Mosque in Tunis, in the Great Mosque of Kairouan and, according to tradition, even in Italian cathedrals.
And so the city that had twice been one of the largest in the Mediterranean, first Punic and then Roman, ended up as a field of scattered ruins and a modest village. Only in modern times, with the birth of archaeology and European interest in the ancient world, did systematic excavations begin to uncover the treasures you can visit today.
The legacy of Carthage, however, goes far beyond its stones. Its duel with Rome is one of the great stories of world history, and the image of Hannibal crossing the Alps still fascinates centuries later. The Bardo's mosaic collection, much of it from Roman Carthage, is the largest in the world. And the site, now an elegant suburb of the Tunisian capital and home to the presidential residence, has a unique aura: few places let you walk, facing the same sea, on the stage of Phoenicians, Romans, early Christians, Vandals, Byzantines and Arabs. In 1979, UNESCO declared the archaeological site of Carthage a World Heritage Site, recognising its outstanding value for all of civilisation.
