Long before any Phoenician ship sighted its coasts, the land that is now Tunisia was inhabited by the ancestors of the Berbers, or Amazigh (meaning 'free people' in their language), the original inhabitants of all North Africa. Their presence goes back thousands of years. Between 10,000 and 6000 BC, the inland areas of Tunisia and neighbouring eastern Algeria were home to the Capsian culture, named after the city of Gafsa, ancient Capsa. It was a culture of hunter-gatherers in a Sahara that was still green, and it left behind flint tools, ostrich eggshell ornaments and burials.
When the climate dried and the Sahara turned to desert, these peoples organised themselves into tribes of herders and farmers. The Greeks and Romans called them 'Libyans', 'Numidians' or 'Gaetulians'. They spoke related Berber languages that still survive in a few corners of the country, such as the island of Djerba and the mountain villages of the south. The Berbers were never just a backdrop for the civilisations that arrived by sea. They were central players. They traded and fought with the Phoenicians and formed powerful kingdoms such as the Numidia of King Masinissa, Rome's decisive ally against Carthage. Their territory, their ways of adapting to it and their bloodlines lie at the root of everything that came afterwards.
That continuity is one of the keys to understanding Tunisia. Through Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks and French, the Berber foundation never disappeared. Arabic and Islam eventually prevailed after the 7th-century conquest, but Amazigh identity still beats beneath the surface of modern Tunisia: in the earthen architecture of the south, in the dialects, in tribal traditions.
Around 814 BC, according to tradition, Phoenician settlers from the city of Tyre (in modern Lebanon) founded a city on a peninsula in the Gulf of Tunis. They called it Qart-Hadasht, the 'New City', which the Romans turned into Carthago: Carthage. Legend credited its founding to Queen Elissa, the Dido whom Virgil would immortalise centuries later in the Aeneid. She had fled Tyre after her husband was murdered by her own brother, King Pygmalion. The Phoenicians were the great sailors and merchants of the ancient Mediterranean, and Carthage, with its double artificial harbour and its strategic position in the middle of the sea, was destined to inherit from its mother city and outgrow it.
When Phoenicia itself fell under the rule of the eastern empires in the 6th century BC, Carthage became independent and the head of its own empire. It was the greatest maritime and commercial power of its time. It controlled the coasts of North Africa, the south and east of the Iberian Peninsula, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta and the Balearics. Its fleets traded in tin, silver, gold, ivory, slaves and purple dye, and the Carthaginian navigator Hanno explored the Atlantic coast of Africa. The city was governed by an oligarchy of merchant families through magistrates called suffetes and a powerful Senate, and at its peak it had hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.
Carthaginian, or Punic, culture was brilliant, and to Greek and Roman eyes it was also unsettling. The Carthaginians worshipped Phoenician gods such as Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit, the city's protector, and dedicated a sanctuary to them, the tophet, where thousands of urns holding the cremated remains of small children have been found. Ancient authors denounced ritual child sacrifice, and historians are still debating it. Some specialists consider it fact. Others argue that the tophet was a cemetery for children who died of natural causes and that the accusations were amplified by enemy propaganda. Whatever the truth, that prosperous, expanding empire was on a collision course with a power growing on the other side of the Strait of Sicily: Rome.
Carthage and Rome fought for control of the western Mediterranean in three terrible wars, the Punic Wars (264-146 BC), named after 'Puni', the Latin name for the Phoenicians of Carthage. The First Punic War (264-241 BC) was fought mainly over Sicily and at sea. Rome had no naval tradition, but it built a fleet from nothing, learned to fight on the water and eventually won, taking Sicily from Carthage and later Sardinia and Corsica. It was a humiliating defeat, and it pushed the Carthaginians to make up for their losses by expanding into the Iberian Peninsula under the Barca family.
The Second Punic War (218-201 BC) belongs to the great figure of Carthaginian history, Hannibal Barca. From his base at Carthago Nova (Cartagena, in Spain), Hannibal carried out one of the boldest military feats of antiquity. He crossed the Pyrenees, Gaul and then, in the depths of winter, the Alps, with tens of thousands of soldiers and his famous war elephants, and fell on Italy by surprise. For fifteen years he defeated Roman armies again and again on their own soil. At the Battle of Cannae (216 BC) he produced a masterpiece of military tactics, surrounding and wiping out a Roman army twice the size of his own in one of the bloodiest defeats in Rome's history. But he never managed to take the city of Rome or to break the loyalty of its Italian allies.
Rome changed strategy. Instead of chasing Hannibal around Italy, the general Publius Cornelius Scipio took the war to Africa, which forced Carthage to call its great commander home to defend the homeland. In 202 BC, at the Battle of Zama on Tunisian soil, Scipio finally defeated Hannibal with the help of the cavalry of the Berber king Masinissa of Numidia. Carthage had to surrender, give up its fleet and territories and pay a crushing indemnity. Hannibal was hunted down and ended his days in exile in the East, where he poisoned himself rather than fall into Roman hands. Carthage survived, but it was humiliated and at the mercy of its enemy.
Even though Carthage was subdued and disarmed, its economic recovery alone was enough to alarm Rome. According to tradition, the senator Cato the Elder ended every one of his speeches with the same sentence: 'Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam' ('furthermore, I believe that Carthage must be destroyed'). In 149 BC, using a pretext, Rome launched the Third Punic War. Carthage held out through a desperate three-year siege, but in the spring of 146 BC the legions of Scipio Aemilianus broke into the city. After six days of house-to-house fighting, Carthage was razed, its surviving population was sold into slavery and its territory became the Roman province of Africa. The story that the Romans sowed the ground with salt so that nothing would ever grow again is a later myth, but the city's destruction was real and total.
A century later, though, the Romans themselves refounded Carthage as a Roman colony, first under Julius Caesar and then under Augustus. The new city grew into one of the largest and richest in the Empire, capital of the province and Rome's main supplier of grain and olive oil. The province of Africa Proconsularis enjoyed centuries of prosperity. Its plains produced enormous quantities of wheat and olive oil that fed the city of Rome, and that wealth paid for monumental cities whose remains make today's Tunisia a museum of the Roman world.
Two sites sum it up. In Thysdrus, modern El Jem, the oil wealth of the Sahel paid for a colossal amphitheatre built around 238 AD for some 35,000 spectators. It is one of the best preserved in the world and a rival to the Colosseum in Rome. In the hills inland, Thugga (today's Dougga) is the best-preserved Roman city in North Africa, with its capitol, theatre and temples built over the layout of an old Numidian capital. The Bardo Museum in the capital also holds the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics, evidence of how splendid Latin Africa once was.
Roman Africa was one of the cradles of Latin Christianity. By the 2nd and 3rd centuries a vigorous Church had grown up here, and it gave history some huge figures: Tertullian of Carthage, the first great Christian writer in Latin; Saint Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, martyred in 258; and the martyrs Perpetua and Felicity, executed in the amphitheatre of Carthage in 203, whose prison account is one of the most moving texts of early Christianity. Above them all stands Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), born in Thagaste and bishop of Hippo (in neighbouring Algeria, but part of the same Roman African world). His 'Confessions' and 'The City of God' are among the foundations of Western thought and Christian theology.
African Christianity was torn by a deep schism, Donatism. For more than a century it pitted those who demanded a Church of the pure, one that rejected clergy who had given way during the persecutions, against the official Church that Augustine defended. It was a religious split and also a social one, with shades of Berber and peasant protest against the Roman order.
In 439 the province fell to the Vandals, a Germanic people who crossed over from Hispania, took Carthage and founded a kingdom that dominated the western Mediterranean and even sacked Rome itself in 455. The Vandals, who were Arian Christians, ruled for a century until 533-534, when the general Belisarius, sent from Constantinople by Emperor Justinian, reconquered Africa for the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine rule, Christian and Greek- and Latin-speaking, lasted another century and a half, defended by lines of fortresses, while a new and unstoppable force was already advancing from the east: the armies of Islam.
In the second half of the 7th century, Arab armies carrying the new faith of Islam had already conquered Egypt, and they pushed west into the Maghreb. Around 670 the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi founded a garrison city inland, far from the coast and the Byzantine fleets, to serve as a base for conquering all of North Africa: Kairouan (al-Qayrawan, 'the camp'). Resistance was fierce. The Byzantines held out on the coast, and the Berbers fought back under legendary leaders such as King Kusaila and, above all, the Kahina, a Berber warrior queen who led the resistance until her death around 700. That same year the Arabs took and destroyed Byzantine Carthage, and the whole region came under Muslim rule with the name Ifriqiya.
Kairouan became the capital of that vast province and very soon the great religious and intellectual centre of Islam across the whole Muslim West. Its Great Mosque, founded by Uqba and rebuilt in the 9th century, is one of the oldest and most revered in the Islamic world, and it served as the architectural model for the mosques of the Maghreb and al-Andalus. The city came to be considered the fourth holy city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, and a pilgrimage to Kairouan was seen as an act of great religious merit.
More decisive than the military conquest was the slow but deep Arabisation and Islamisation of the population. Over the following centuries Arabic gradually displaced the Berber languages and African Latin, and Islam became the religion of the vast majority. Kairouan drove that process. From its university and its schools of law, where scholars such as Sahnun taught (he did more than anyone to spread the Maliki school that still prevails in the Maghreb), the Arabic language, the faith and the Arab-Islamic culture spread out and shaped Tunisia's identity for good.
Under the distant rule of the caliphs in Damascus and later Baghdad, Ifriqiya began to go its own way. In 800 the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid recognised Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as hereditary emir, and so began the Aghlabid dynasty (800-909), which ruled from Kairouan with growing autonomy. It was a time of splendour. The Aghlabids beautified their capital, enlarged the Great Mosque, built the great water cisterns that can still be seen in Kairouan, and gave Sousse and other coastal cities ribats, fortified monasteries for war and for faith. From Ifriqiya they also launched the conquest of Sicily, which stayed under Muslim rule for more than two centuries.
The Aghlabids were overthrown by a religious and political movement rooted in Shi'ism: the Fatimids. Preaching the coming of the Mahdi, the missionary Abu Abdallah al-Shii raised the Kutama Berber tribes in revolt and in 909 overthrew the Aghlabids, proclaiming a new Shi'ite caliphate to rival Baghdad. Its leader, Abdallah al-Mahdi, founded a new fortified capital on the coast, Mahdia, which bears his name. From Ifriqiya the Fatimids set out to conquer all of North Africa and, in 969, Egypt, where they founded a new capital: Cairo. When they moved the centre of their empire there, they left Ifriqiya in the hands of their Berber deputies, the Zirids.
The Zirids eventually broke with their former Fatimid masters and returned to Sunni orthodoxy. The Fatimid response from Egypt was devastating. In the 11th century they unleashed the Bedouin Arab tribes of the Banu Hilal on Ifriqiya. Their mass migration, remembered in Arab folk epic, laid waste to fields and cities, hastened the ruin of the countryside and completed, this time for good, the linguistic Arabisation of the country. Kairouan was sacked in 1057 and lost its primacy for ever. Yet that long age of dynasties left an immense legacy: Ifriqiya had become, irreversibly, an Arab and Muslim land with a brilliant cultural identity of its own.
After the empire of the Almohads, the great Berber reform movement that dominated the Maghreb and al-Andalus in the 12th and 13th centuries, Ifriqiya regained its independence under a dynasty that would rule for more than three centuries: the Hafsids (1229-1574). Their founder, Abu Zakariya, an Almohad governor, declared himself an independent ruler. He set up his capital not in old Kairouan inland but in Tunis, the city by the sea, which from then on would always be the country's capital and would give the country its name.
Under the Hafsids, Tunis enjoyed a commercial and cultural golden age. The city became one of the great metropolises of the Mediterranean, a crossroads of routes between Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the East. The Zaytuna mosque grew into a great centre of learning, and madrasas, souks and palaces went up. Much of the medina of Tunis, now a World Heritage Site, took its shape in this period. Genoese, Pisan, Venetian and Catalan merchants kept their trading houses in the city, and the Hafsid rulers even claimed the title of caliph. In the 14th century their court employed the great historian and thinker Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis and regarded as one of the founders of sociology and of the philosophy of history.
Hafsid Tunis also took in thousands of Muslim and Jewish refugees driven out of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christian Reconquista, and they enriched its crafts, its music and its city life. But the dynasty's power weakened through internal struggles, and from the 16th century the country was caught in the great Mediterranean contest between two empires, the Spanish Habsburgs and the Ottomans. That rivalry would make Tunis and its ports the stage for a new era: the age of the corsairs.
In the 16th century the Mediterranean was a battlefield between Habsburg Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and the coasts of North Africa became a red-hot frontier. The great Turkish corsairs, above all the Barbarossa brothers, put their fleets at the service of the sultan in Istanbul. Tunis changed hands several times. The corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa took it in 1534, Emperor Charles V won it back for his Hafsid protégé in 1535, and finally, in 1574, a large Ottoman expedition led by Sinan Pasha captured Tunis for good. It ended the Hafsid dynasty and annexed the country to the Ottoman Empire as a province (a regency) governed from Istanbul.
For the next three centuries Tunisia was part of the Ottoman Empire, though with growing autonomy. At first it was governed by a pasha sent by the sultan and a militia of Turkish janissaries, but real power soon passed to local military chiefs known as deys and beys. The regency's economy relied heavily on privateering. Fleets based in Bizerte, La Goulette, Sousse and Sfax raided Christian ships in the Mediterranean, seized cargo and took captives who were ransomed or sold as slaves, in a trade that ran in both directions between the two shores of the sea.
In the early 18th century the bey Husayn ibn Ali founded the Husainid dynasty (1705-1957), which would rule Tunisia until the republic was proclaimed: first as Ottoman beys, then under the French protectorate and finally as independent kings. The Husainid beys made Tunisia a state increasingly independent of Istanbul, with its own court at the Bardo palace. In the 19th century they tried to modernise the country. They abolished slavery in 1846, before many European countries did, and in 1861 they issued the first constitution in the Arab-Muslim world. But the reforms and the debts owed to European banks ruined the state's finances, and that bankruptcy would give France the pretext it was looking for to intervene.
In 1881, using a raid by border tribes into already-colonised Algeria as a pretext, France invaded Tunisia with an army of tens of thousands of men. The bey, Muhammad al-Sadiq, lacking the strength to resist, was forced to sign the Treaty of Bardo in his palace on 12 May 1881, which placed the country's foreign policy and defence in French hands. Two years later, the La Marsa Convention (1883) completed the subjugation: Tunisia became a French protectorate. Formally the bey still reigned, but real power passed to a French resident general and the colonial administration.
The protectorate transformed the country. France built railways, ports, roads and schools, and exploited its resources, above all the rich phosphate deposits of Gafsa, which made Tunisia one of the world's largest producers. A large population of European settlers, French and Italian, moved in and took over the best farmland. Under the veneer of a 'civilising mission', the colonial system was deeply unequal: Tunisians were relegated to a subordinate role, with fewer rights, lower wages and little access to education or positions of power.
Tunisian nationalism was born of that injustice. In 1920 the Destour ('Constitution') party was founded, and in 1934 a young French-trained lawyer, Habib Bourguiba, broke with the old notables and created the Neo-Destour, a modern mass party that would carry the struggle for independence across the whole country. Bourguiba was jailed and exiled by the French again and again. After the Second World War, during which Tunisia was the stage, in 1942-1943, for the hard-fought campaign between the Allies and the Axis forces, nationalist pressure became irresistible: there were strikes, attacks and a guerrilla movement, the fellaghas, in the mountains. In the end, a France weakened by the war in Indochina, and by the one already looming in Algeria, chose to negotiate. On 20 March 1956, Tunisia won its independence.
Tunisia gained independence on 20 March 1956, and the following year, in 1957, Habib Bourguiba abolished the beylical monarchy and proclaimed the republic, becoming its first president. Bourguiba, who would rule for thirty years, embodied a modernising, secular and authoritarian project. His best-known reform was the 1956 Code of Personal Status, which gave Tunisian women the most advanced rights in the Arab world: it abolished polygamy, established judicial divorce, set a minimum age for marriage and required the woman's consent. He also pushed universal education, public healthcare and a modern state, and kept Tunisia one of the most secular and progressive countries in the region.
But the flip side of that project was a one-party regime (the Neo-Destour, later renamed) with no room for opposition. Bourguiba concentrated all power in his own hands, cultivated a personality cult as the 'Supreme Combatant' and in 1975 had himself proclaimed president for life. Over the years, as he grew old and his health declined, his rule became erratic and repressive, especially towards the growing Islamist movement.
On 7 November 1987, his prime minister, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, removed him in a bloodless coup, relying on a medical certificate declaring him unfit, and took over the presidency. Ben Ali promised democratic opening but soon set up an even more police-driven and corrupt regime. For twenty-three years he ruled through an all-pervasive security apparatus, press censorship, electoral fraud and the repression of any dissent, while his family and that of his wife, Leila Trabelsi, grabbed a large share of the economy through corruption and patronage. To the outside world, Tunisia looked like a stable, tourist-friendly country with good economic indicators; behind closed doors, youth unemployment, the gap between the prosperous coast and the neglected interior, and a political suffocation with no way out were all simmering.
On 17 December 2010, in the inland town of Sidi Bouzid, a young street fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, humiliated by the confiscation of his goods and mistreatment by officials, set himself on fire in front of the local government building. His desperate act (he died of his burns in early January) became the spark of a revolution. Pent-up anger over unemployment, high prices, corruption and the lack of freedoms spilled onto the streets: protests spread from the neglected interior to the cities and the capital, fuelled by social media and by the brutality of the police crackdown, which left hundreds dead.
After 28 days of unstoppable demonstrations, on 14 January 2011 President Ben Ali fled the country and took refuge in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three years of dictatorship. It was the first time a popular uprising had toppled an Arab autocrat, and its shockwave unleashed what became known as the Arab Spring: in the following weeks and months, uprisings broke out in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain. The Tunisian revolution, known as the Jasmine Revolution or the Dignity Revolution, set the whole region alight.
Unlike almost all the others, Tunisia's was the only one of those revolts that managed to lead to a democracy. The country held free elections, drafted a new constitution in 2014 hailed as one of the most advanced in the Arab world, and a Quartet of civil society organisations that mediated in the political crisis was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. The road, however, was hard: economic crisis, jihadist attacks that hit tourism, instability and disillusionment. In 2021, President Kais Saied suspended Parliament and concentrated power, an authoritarian turn that many observers see as a serious democratic setback. Fragile and contested, the legacy of 2011 is still at stake, but no one disputes that it was in a town in central Tunisia that the whole Arab world began to shake.
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The Tunisian Sahel (not to be confused with the sub-Saharan African Sahel) is the coastal strip in the centre-east of the country, between the Gulf of Hammamet and the Gulf of Gabès. Its name comes from the Arabic 'sahil', 'coast'. It is a gentle, luminous plain covered to the horizon with millions of olive trees, and that image is nothing new: already in Roman times, the olive tree and its oil were the region's source of wealth. Cities such as Thysdrus (El Jem) grew rich on the trade in oil exported to Rome, and that prosperity is fossilised in the monuments that still survive.
The olive tree shaped not only the landscape but society too. The Sahel developed a structure of small and medium landowners, a dense network of towns and cities and a hard-working, enterprising population. Much of modern Tunisia's elite came from this land: it is no coincidence that both Habib Bourguiba, father of independence, and his successor Ben Ali were born in the Sahel, in Monastir and Hammam Sousse respectively. For decades the region enjoyed a privileged position in the country's politics and economy.
That dominance of the Sahel and the coast over the neglected interior (the 'other Tunisia', poor and without opportunities) was precisely one of the fault lines that erupted in the 2011 Revolution, which began in the forgotten centre of the country. The Sahel thus embodies both faces of Tunisia: the prosperous, touristy, well-connected coast, and an uneven development that the revolution put at the centre of the national debate.
Sousse, Tunisia's third city, is a lively coastal city whose history goes back to the Phoenicians, who founded the colony of Hadrumetum here, one of the oldest in the country. Under Rome it was an important city, and from that period mosaics and Christian catacombs with kilometres of galleries survive. But its present look was defined by the Islamic period: its medina, a World Heritage Site, is a magnificent example of an Arab city from the first centuries of Islam in the Maghreb.
At the heart of the medina stands the ribat of Sousse, from the 8th-9th century, one of the best preserved in the Islamic world: a fortress-monastery where warriors of the faith kept watch against Christian raids from the sea while devoting themselves to prayer and study. Alongside it, the Great Mosque, austere and almost military in appearance, and the kasbah crowning the city complete an ensemble that reflects the Ifriqiya of the Aghlabids, when these shores were a fortified frontier of Islam.
In the 20th century Sousse became one of the country's great tourist centres, surrounded by beaches and hotel complexes. That status tragically put it on the world map in June 2015, when a jihadist attack on a beach in neighbouring Port El Kantaoui killed 38 foreign tourists, the worst attack in the country's recent history. The blow sank tourism, one of the pillars of the Tunisian economy, for years and tested the resilience of the young democracy born of the revolution.
A little further south, on a point jutting into the sea, lies Monastir, the Roman Ruspina. Its most imposing monument is the Ribat of Harthema, from the 8th century, the oldest fortress-monastery of its kind in North Africa and one of the best preserved; its towers and walls have also become famous as a filming location for films such as Monty Python's 'Life of Brian'.
But Monastir is, above all, the birthplace of Habib Bourguiba, born here in 1903. The founder and first president of independent Tunisia turned his home town into a showcase for the regime: he modernised it, gave it infrastructure and an international airport, and had a grand family mausoleum built next to the ribat, crowned by a golden dome and flanked by minarets, where his remains have rested since his death in 2000. The Bourguiba Mausoleum is today one of the country's great places of memory.
The figure of Bourguiba sums up the tensions of contemporary Tunisia: the moderniser who emancipated women, made education universal and built a secular state, and at the same time the autocrat who ruled without opposition for thirty years and had himself proclaimed president for life. Exploring Monastir, with its medieval ribat and its 20th-century mausoleum side by side, means seeing within a few metres the two great stories of the city and the country: the old warrior Ifriqiya of the faith and the modern republic born in 1957.
In the middle of the Sahel's plain of olive groves, the small town of El Jem holds one of the most astonishing monuments of the entire Roman world: a colossal amphitheatre visible from kilometres away, rising above the town's low houses like a mirage. It was built around 238 AD in the prosperous city of Thysdrus, which grew rich on the olive oil trade. With a major axis of 148 metres and an estimated capacity of some 35,000 spectators, it is one of the largest amphitheatres of the Empire, comparable to the Colosseum in Rome, and the best preserved in Africa.
Its arena hosted gladiator fights, battles with wild beasts and shows that drew the crowds of the Roman Sahel. Its solid stone construction allowed it to survive the centuries: in medieval times it even served as a fortress and refuge during revolts against those in power, and local tradition links it to the Kahina, the Berber queen who resisted the Arab conquest. Today it is a World Heritage Site, and every summer it hosts a prestigious international festival of symphonic music that fills its stone tiers once again.
The amphitheatre of El Jem is the most spectacular testimony to the opulent Roman Africa that was the granary and the oil jar of the Empire. Its colossal presence in the middle of a modest town and a sea of olive trees sums up the history of this land like few other places: a corner of the Mediterranean that, thanks to the wealth of its countryside, could afford to build monuments on a par with the great capitals of the ancient world.
South of Monastir, the Sahel coast holds two more cities steeped in history. Mahdia, on a narrow peninsula jutting out into the sea, was founded in 921 by Abdallah al-Mahdi, the first caliph of the Fatimid dynasty, as the fortified and impregnable capital of his newborn Shia empire. From this stronghold, protected by walls and by its almost island-like position, the Fatimids launched the conquest that would take them as far as Egypt and to the founding of Cairo. From that period survive the great fortified gate of Skifa el-Kahla and the Fatimid mosque, rebuilt on top of the original. Later, Mahdia became a notorious corsair den and a centre of the silk industry.
Further south, Sfax is the country's second city and its economic capital: a large industrial and commercial port, the heart of olive oil and phosphate exports, known for being hard-working and austere. It preserves one of the best-kept and least touristy walled medinas in Tunisia, a living, authentic old town enclosed by its Aghlabid-era walls.
Off Sfax lie the quiet Kerkennah Islands, a flat, sandy archipelago of fishermen, with palm groves and traditional fishing methods, which was a place of exile for Bourguiba himself during the struggle for independence. This whole southern stretch of the Sahel links the Mediterranean coast with the world of the south: the gateway to the oases, the desert and the island of Djerba.
In the fertile hills of northwestern Tunisia, overlooking a valley of wheat fields and olive groves, lies Dougga, ancient Thugga, considered the best-preserved Roman city in North Africa and a World Heritage Site. Before Rome arrived, Thugga was the capital of an important Libyco-Punic kingdom, and from that Berber and Carthaginian past it keeps a unique gem: the Libyco-Punic Mausoleum, a funerary tower from the 2nd century BC that is one of the few examples of Numidian architecture still standing.
Under Rome the city flourished for centuries, and in a rather unusual way: instead of wiping out the indigenous layout to impose the usual Roman grid, the Romans built on the irregular plan of the old Numidian town, which gives Dougga its winding streets and its unique charm. The result is an exceptional site: the Capitol with its Corinthian columns dedicated to the triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, the theatre looking out over the valley, the forum, the temples of Saturn and Juno Caelestis, the arches, the baths and even a brothel with its stone sign, all scattered across a hillside of serene beauty.
Dougga lets you grasp, like few other places, how deep the Romanisation of Africa ran and, at the same time, how mixed its character was: here the Roman world was quite literally built on the foundations of the Berber and Punic world. Its relative isolation saved it from destruction and plunder, and today walking its almost empty streets, among nearly intact monuments and fields of grain, is one of the most evocative experiences of ancient heritage anywhere in the Mediterranean.
On the dry plain of central Tunisia stands Kairouan, the country's most revered city and one of the holiest in all of Islam. It was founded around 670 by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi as a military base for the conquest of the Maghreb, and it soon became the first great Arab capital of North Africa and the religious and intellectual beacon of Islam in the West. For centuries, Kairouan spread the Arabic language, the Muslim faith and the Maliki school of law across the Maghreb and al-Andalus. Tradition hallowed it as the fourth holy city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
Its supreme monument is the Great Mosque of Uqba, founded together with the city and rebuilt in the 9th century by the Aghlabids in the monumental form it keeps today: a vast courtyard, a forest of ancient columns reused from Roman and Byzantine ruins, and a massive minaret that is one of the oldest in the world and served as the model for minarets across the Islamic West. Around it, the medina of Kairouan, a World Heritage Site, holds other treasures such as the Mosque of the Three Doors, the great Aghlabid cisterns that supplied the city with water, and the mausoleum of Sidi Sahab, the 'Barber', a companion of the Prophet.
Kairouan is also a living city of craftspeople, famous throughout the Arab world for its hand-knotted carpets, a centuries-old tradition that supports a good part of its economy. Wandering its white alleys, its great mosque and its souks means diving into the spiritual heart of Tunisia, where Islam took root in the Maghreb and from where it spread for more than a thousand years.
Kairouan's golden age was the 9th century, under the Aghlabid dynasty (800-909), which made it their capital and one of the richest and most cultured cities of the Islamic world, compared with Basra and Kufa in the East. The Aghlabid emirs embellished the city, rebuilt the Great Mosque in its definitive form and raised monumental waterworks such as the great circular cisterns that still survive today, feats of engineering that guaranteed water in the middle of the steppe.
But the greatest legacy of that era was intellectual. The Great Mosque of Kairouan housed a university and teaching schools that made the city a centre of learning of the first rank, sometimes compared with what the University of Paris would later be in medieval Europe. Jurists such as Sahnun, author of a foundational work of the Maliki school, taught here, as did scholars such as Asad ibn al-Furat. Kairouan saw not only Islamic theology and law flourish, but also medicine —with figures such as Ibn al-Jazzar, whose treatises were translated into Latin and studied in Europe— and other sciences.
That splendour ended when the Fatimids overthrew the Aghlabids in 909 and moved power first to Mahdia and then to Cairo. The final blow came in 1057, when the city was sacked by the Arab tribes of the Banu Hilal, which sank Kairouan and made it lose its political primacy to Tunis for good. But its religious prestige survived intact: stripped of power, Kairouan remained, and still remains, the sacred heart of Tunisia and one of the great holy cities of Islam.
Northwestern Tunisia, wetter and more mountainous, was the granary of Roman Africa and holds, besides Dougga, other remarkable sites. At Bulla Regia, the Romans came up with a unique architectural answer to the heat: they built villas with underground floors, real houses below ground decorated with superb mosaics that are still in their original place, an exceptional case in the whole Roman world. At Chemtou, ancient Simitthus, they quarried the famous yellow marble veined with red —'giallo antico'—, one of the most prized in the Empire, cut by thousands of forced labourers and shipped to Rome to adorn its temples and palaces.
This region was the heart of Numidia, the Berber kingdom that played a decisive role in the Punic Wars. Its king Masinissa, Rome's ally against Carthage at the Battle of Zama, united the Numidian tribes and created a powerful state; his grandson Jugurtha would later defy Rome in a long and famous war. Under the Empire, these plains were covered with towns, villas and wheat fields whose harvests fed the capital.
The northwest also holds more recent and harsher memories. In the Second World War, these hills and valleys were the setting of the Tunisian campaign (1942-1943), the final battle of North Africa between the Allies and the Axis forces of Germany and Italy, which ended with the surrender of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and opened the way for the Allied invasion of Italy. Numerous military cemeteries in the region remember the thousands who fell in that campaign.
Inland Tunisia —the steppes and towns of the centre and northwest, far from the prosperous, touristy coast— carries a history of economic marginalisation that the country's politics never solved. While the Sahel coast and the capital drew the investment, the tourism and the jobs, inland regions such as Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and Gafsa —the latter the heart of the phosphate mines— suffered unemployment, poverty and neglect. That gap between the two Tunisias was a deep fault line running through the country for the whole of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.
The 2011 Revolution grew out of that wound. It did not start in the capital or on the coast, but in Sidi Bouzid, a modest farming town in the interior: there, on 17 December 2010, the young street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after being humiliated by the municipal police, an act of despair that distilled the frustration of a whole generation with no future. The news spread through social media, and the protests swept first through the towns of the interior before reaching the capital and bringing about, on 14 January 2011, the fall of the dictator Ben Ali.
It was no coincidence that the spark of the Arab Spring caught precisely in Tunisia's forgotten interior: it was the explosion of decades of regional inequality. The revolution put that 'other Tunisia' at the centre of the national debate, but the underlying problems —unemployment, lack of opportunities, the distance between the coast and the interior— remained unsolved in the years that followed, feeding disillusionment with the young and fragile democracy. The interior thus remains not only the guardian of the country's great Roman and Islamic heritage, but also the social conscience of contemporary Tunisia.
Off the southeast coast of Tunisia, in the Gulf of Gabès, lies Djerba, the largest island in North Africa, a flat, sunny land of palm groves, olive trees and white villages. Djerba is said to be the 'island of the Lotus-eaters' that Homer describes in the Odyssey, where Ulysses' sailors, after tasting the fruit of the lotus, forgot their longing to return home. Beyond the legend, the island was a coveted enclave thanks to its strategic position: Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans from Sicily, corsairs and Spaniards fought over it through the centuries. One episode stuck in the memory: after a naval battle in 1560, the victorious Ottomans piled up the skulls of the fallen Christian soldiers into a macabre tower that stood for centuries.
Djerba developed a singular, tolerant identity shaped by its island character. A good part of its population is of Berber origin and Ibadi faith, a minority branch of Islam distinct from the Sunni majority on the mainland, with its own fortress-like, whitewashed mosques spread across the island. That earthen architecture —the fortified courtyard houses or 'houch', the underground mosques, the water-collection systems— led to Djerba being declared a World Heritage Site in 2023 as testimony to a settlement pattern adapted to an arid island territory.
Today Djerba is also one of the country's great tourist destinations, with its beaches, its capital Houmt Souk and its lively souks, and street-art projects such as the Erriadh neighbourhood, covered in murals by artists from all over the world. Beneath the sun and the tourism, the island keeps its mosaic of identities —Berber and Ibadi, Arab Sunni, Jewish— that make it one of the most singular places in the Mediterranean.
Djerba is home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world and the oldest in Africa. Its symbol is the Ghriba synagogue ('the extraordinary one' or 'the secluded one'), in the village of Hara Seghira. According to tradition, its origins go back to the priests who fled Jerusalem after the Babylonians destroyed Solomon's Temple in 586 BC, or else after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD; it is even said that a stone from the Temple is built into the sanctuary. The current building dates from the 19th century, but the site has been revered as a place of Jewish worship for millennia.
The Ghriba is the destination of an annual pilgrimage that, every spring at the festival of Lag BaOmer, brings together Jews of Tunisian origin from Israel, France and around the world, in one of the most vibrant expressions of Maghrebi Judaism. Djerba's Jewish community, once large, has shrunk greatly after the great emigrations of the 20th century, but around a thousand Jews still live on the island, mainly in the villages of Hara Kebira and Hara Seghira, keeping up their traditions, their Talmudic schools and their trades.
That presence has not been free of tragedy: in 2002, an Al Qaeda truck bombing outside the Ghriba killed around twenty people, most of them German tourists, and in 2023 a shooting during the pilgrimage again claimed several victims. Despite everything, the community and the pilgrimage endure, and the Ghriba remains a moving testimony to the age-old coexistence of Jews and Muslims on this island in southern Tunisia, now recognised by Unesco as part of Djerba's heritage.
In the arid hills of the south, near Gabès, lies Matmata, a Berber village famous for its extraordinary troglodyte houses. To shelter from the extreme heat of the day and the cold of the desert night, the Berber inhabitants of the region dug their homes into the earth: large circular pits open to the sky, around which rooms are carved out like caves, linked by tunnels. The result is a lunar landscape of inhabited craters, invisible from the surface, that keep a steady temperature all year round and are among the most remarkable examples of vernacular architecture adapted to the climate.
These underground houses are the legacy of the Berber peoples of southern Tunisia, who for centuries kept their language, customs and way of life apart from the cities. The region also holds other kinds of singular Amazigh architecture: the ksour, fortified villages of communal granaries —the ghorfas—, vaulted cells stacked one on top of another where the tribes stored grain and oil, such as the spectacular complexes of Ksar Ouled Soltane or Chenini and Douiret, villages perched on the ridges.
Matmata became world-famous for an unexpected reason: in 1976, filmmaker George Lucas shot scenes for the first 'Star Wars' film here. The troglodyte Hotel Sidi Driss, one of these dug-out houses, became the home of young Luke Skywalker on the planet Tatooine —whose name, in fact, was inspired by the nearby Tunisian town of Tataouine—. Since then, generations of travellers have come to Matmata to sleep underground in 'Luke's home' and, along the way, to discover the age-old Berber culture that gave rise to these magical houses.
At the gates of the Sahara, in the Djerid region, the oases of Tozeur and Nefta make an astonishing contrast with the surrounding desert: vast palm groves of hundreds of thousands of date palms, watered by springs through an ancient and sophisticated system of water-sharing channels designed, according to tradition, by the medieval scholar Ibn Chabbat in the 13th century. In the shade of the palms, fruit trees and vegetables grow in three-tier farming, a masterpiece of human ingenuity in the face of aridity.
Tozeur, the region's capital, is famous for its traditional fired-brick architecture, with façades decorated with raised geometric patterns that create a distinctive play of light and shadow, especially in the old quarter of Ouled el-Hadef. For centuries the city was an important stop on the caravan routes that crossed the Sahara carrying gold, salt and slaves between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Nefta, its neighbour, is a great centre of Sufism, with dozens of saints' mausoleums and its spectacular 'Corbeille', a natural amphitheatre of springs and palm trees.
This whole southwestern region has become the gateway to the Tunisian desert and a film set: the dune landscapes and the mountain oases of Chebika, Tamerza and Mides —tucked into gorges of the Atlas Mountains next to the Algerian border— have served as the backdrop for many films. Near Tozeur you can also find the remains of the Mos Espa set, the desert town from the 'Star Wars' saga, now slowly besieged by the sands of the Sahara, which draws travellers from all over the world.
Between the oases of the Jerid and the great desert lies the Chott el Djerid, the largest salt lake in the Sahara, a depression of some 7,000 square kilometres that dries out almost completely in summer and turns into a vast white crust of salt glaring blindingly under the sun. The road that crosses it seems to float over nothing; in the hottest hours, the hot air makes mirages of water and non-existent lakes dance across the surface. In winter, when the rains partly flood it, the chott takes on pink and violet hues from the algae and minerals, in a landscape of unreal beauty.
Beyond the chott the real Sahara begins: the great sea of dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental, with the town of Douz as the famous 'gateway to the desert', the starting point for camel or 4x4 expeditions into the sands and home to a traditional Sahara festival that brings together the tribes of the south. This is the land of the old nomads, whose caravans spent months crossing these vast expanses, following the wells and the oases.
The Tunisian desert, with its light, its silence and its otherworldly landscapes, has fascinated travellers and filmmakers alike —it was here, in the south, that the deserts of Tatooine were filmed—. But for the people who live here, Berbers and Arabs of the south, it is not a film set but a world with its own rules, its age-old culture of survival and its own way of living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth. The Chott el Djerid and the dunes that open out beyond it are Tunisia's southern edge, where the country dissolves into the great sea of sand of the Sahara.
On a peninsula in the Gulf of Tunis, a few kilometres from the capital, stand the ruins of Carthage, the city that was capital of the greatest maritime empire in the western Mediterranean. Founded by Phoenician settlers from Tyre around 814 BC (tradition credits Queen Elissa, or Dido), Carthage ruled the sea for centuries, traded from the Atlantic to the East and fought the Punic Wars against Rome, in which Hannibal rose to fame. Completely razed by the Romans in 146 BC, it was refounded by Augustus and reborn as one of the largest cities of the Empire, capital of the province of Africa.
Today the site, a World Heritage Site, is a mosaic of overlapping layers: the Punic quarter on Byrsa Hill, the tophet with its stelae dedicated to Tanit, the huge artificial harbours that were the city's pride, the Roman Antonine Baths looking out to sea (among the largest in the Empire), the cisterns, the amphitheatre and the villas with mosaics. On the hill also stands the Cathedral of Saint Louis, a reminder of the French king Louis IX, who died at Carthage during the Eighth Crusade in 1270.
Carthage is also sacred ground for early Christianity: Saint Cyprian, Perpetua and Felicity preached and were martyred here, and here the great councils of the African Church were held, the Church in which Saint Augustine rose to prominence. Walking among its fallen columns facing the gulf means seeing, in a single place, the birth and fall of an empire, the mark of Rome and the origins of the faith that would shape the West.
The city of Tunis, which gives the country its name, was for centuries a minor town in the shadow of neighbouring Carthage, until the Hafsid dynasty chose it as its capital in the 13th century. It has kept growing ever since. Its medina (the walled old town) is now a World Heritage Site and one of the best preserved in the Arab world: a maze of alleys, covered souks, fondouks (merchants' inns), palaces and hammams arranged around the great Zaytuna Mosque, the 'olive tree mosque', which for centuries was one of the leading centres of Islamic learning in the Maghreb.
In the medina and its outskirts a refined urban culture flourished: crafts in ceramics, leather, textiles and metal, trades organised into guilds, and a cosmopolitan life enriched by the Andalusians (Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain) who settled here from the 15th century onwards and brought their architecture, cuisine and music. Next to the Arab city, under the French protectorate, the 'ville nouvelle' was built: the European city of broad avenues and colonial-style buildings that surrounds the old medina.
On the outskirts, in the former beylical palace of the Bardo, is the Bardo National Museum, one of the great museums of the Mediterranean, famous for housing the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics, rescued from El Jem, Dougga, Carthage and other sites. In 2015 the museum was the scene of a jihadist attack that cost dozens of lives, a blow to tourism and to Tunisia's young democracy; its reopening was experienced as an act of cultural resistance.
Perched on a cliff overlooking the Gulf of Tunis, very close to Carthage, the village of Sidi Bou Said is the country's most recognisable postcard: a maze of dazzling whitewashed houses with doors and lattice windows painted an intense blue, bougainvillea and cobbled streets running down to the sea. The village takes its name from a 13th-century Sufi saint, Abu Said al-Baji, whose mausoleum crowns the hill and turned the place into a centre of Muslim spirituality.
The distinctive blue-and-white combination is no accident: it was promoted in the early 20th century by a French aristocrat and musicologist, Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, who settled here, built the sumptuous Ennejma Ezzahra palace (now a centre for Arab and Mediterranean music) and championed the aesthetic protection of the village, fixing its colours by decree. Sidi Bou Said thus became a haven for artists, writers and painters: figures such as Paul Klee, August Macke and Michel Foucault passed through its cafés and terraces, drawn by its light.
Today Sidi Bou Said is a bohemian, touristy destination, famous for its Mediterranean views, its traditional cafés (like the legendary Café des Nattes), its jasmine and its calm atmosphere. Beneath the picturesque charm, though, lies a real history: that of a religious sanctuary turned fishing village and, later, a symbol of the cosmopolitan Tunisia that fascinated the European avant-garde.
South-east of the capital stretches the Cap Bon peninsula, a fertile strip of market gardens, vineyards, orange groves and fields of jasmine and orange blossom reaching into the Mediterranean towards Sicily. On its coast lies Hammamet, Tunisia's classic seaside resort. The town, of ancient origin, keeps a small 15th-century walled medina and a kasbah by the sea, but its modern fame was born in the 20th century: in the 1930s the Romanian millionaire George Sebastian built a villa of great beauty here that attracted European artists and intellectuals (Winston Churchill, André Gide and Paul Klee all spent time in the area) and turned Hammamet into a cosmopolitan retreat.
From the 1960s, in independent Tunisia, Hammamet became the country's beach tourism capital, with large hotel complexes that made it known all over Europe. Its Villa Sebastian became an international cultural centre that hosts a renowned theatre and music festival every summer.
Nearby is Nabeul, the regional capital, famous since ancient times for its pottery and glazed ceramics, heirs to a craft tradition going back to Punic and Roman times (ancient Neapolis stood here) and enriched by the arrival of the Andalusians. Cap Bon also holds Punic sites such as Kerkouane, the only Carthaginian city that was never rebuilt by Rome and that preserves, almost intact, the street plan and houses of a Punic town, a unique case in the world and a World Heritage Site.
The far north of Tunisia is the greenest and most mountainous part of the country: the Tell and Kroumirie region, covered in cork oak and holm oak forests, with a humid climate very different from the rest of the territory. On that coast lies Tabarka, a quiet fishing town at the foot of a headland crowned by a Genoese castle, famous for its rock formations (such as the 'Needles', stone columns rising from the sea) and for seabeds rich in red coral, which make the area a diving destination.
Tabarka has a unique history: between 1540 and 1741, the island off the town was held by the Genoese Lomellini family, who used it as a base for coral fishing and trade, a Christian and European enclave right on the Maghreb coast, until the bey of Tunis took it back. Today the town is also known for its international jazz festival.
Further east is Bizerte, the northernmost city in Africa, with its old fishing port and its medina. Its strategic position, next to a channel linking a large inland lake to the Mediterranean, made it a coveted naval base. Under the protectorate, France turned it into a powerful military base, and after independence it became the scene of a dramatic episode: in 1961 Bourguiba's government demanded the evacuation of the base, and the clash with French troops (the 'Bizerte crisis') left hundreds of Tunisians dead. France did not finally leave the base until 1963, closing the last chapter of the colonial presence in the country.
Hardly anything that happened to Tunisia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
