Tunis, the capital, is a city of contrasts to enjoy with all five senses. In just a few steps you go from the bustle of the medieval Medina, a maze of covered alleys, souks selling perfume, jewellery and fabrics, and thousand-year-old mosques, to Avenue Habib Bourguiba, broad and tree-lined, with its cafés, its Art Nouveau theatre and its Catholic cathedral, a legacy of the French protectorate. It's a Mediterranean capital that is Arab and cosmopolitan at the same time, the gateway to the country and the perfect base for discovering nearby Carthage and Sidi Bou Said.
The city's great treasure is the Bardo National Museum, housed in a former beylical palace, which holds the most important collection of Roman mosaics on the planet: kilometres of tesserae rescued from the villas and towns of the ancient province of Africa, with scenes of gods, hunts, banquets and the famous portrait of the poet Virgil. Reopened in 2023 after years of closures, it's a must-see and one of the great museums of the Mediterranean world.
This guide explores Tunis in a practical, friendly way: how to get lost in the Medina without stress, which mosques and palaces to see, how to use the historic TGM train to link Carthage and Sidi Bou Said in a single day, where to eat a good brik or couscous, how to get around by tram and taxi, and how to use the city as a springboard to the rest of Tunisia. The capital rewards curious travellers: behind every studded door in the Medina there's a courtyard, a souk or a story.
Although Carthage was the great metropolis of Antiquity, today's city of Tunis already existed as a Berber and Punic settlement in the shadow of its powerful neighbour. After the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC and its later refounding, Tunis was a minor town until the Arab conquest of the 7th century, when it gained importance. Its golden age came with the Hafsid dynasty (13th-16th centuries), which made it the capital of their kingdom: most of the Medina's mosques, madrasas, palaces and souks, now a World Heritage Site, were built then around the old Zitouna Mosque. The city was fought over by the Spanish and the Ottomans in the 16th century and remained under Ottoman rule until France imposed its protectorate in 1881. The French laid out the Ville Nouvelle next to the Medina, with Avenue Bourguiba as its backbone. Tunis was the stage for the nationalist movement led by Habib Bourguiba that brought independence in 1956, and in 2011 its streets were at the centre of the Revolution that sparked the Arab Spring. 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.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For almost a thousand years, the history of present-day Tunis was the history of an overshadowed younger sister. Just a few kilometres from where the capital stands today, Carthage was in its prime: the great metropolis founded by the Phoenicians around 814 BC, which came to dominate the western Mediterranean and challenged Rome in the three Punic Wars. Next to a neighbour like that, the small settlement the Punic people called Tunes was little more than a modest town on the shore of the lake, useful as a stopping point but with no leading role of its own.
In ancient sources, Tunes almost always appears in connection with Carthage: it was a camp for armies, the scene of mercenary revolts and a strategic point in the wars. When Rome razed Carthage in 146 BC and, according to legend, sowed its land with salt, the whole region came under Roman rule and became the heart of the wealthy province of Africa, the great granary of the Empire. Carthage was refounded as a Roman city and once again became one of the largest cities of the ancient world, while Tunes remained a secondary town beside it.
That long spell in the background would only begin to change centuries later, with the arrival of a new force that would reshape all of North Africa: Islam. The Arab expansion of the 7th century swept away Byzantine rule, founded nearby Kairouan as a religious capital and, little by little, drew importance away from old Carthage towards a more sheltered spot further inland. There, at last, the city of Tunis would begin to grow.
The Muslim conquest of North Africa at the end of the 7th century changed the destiny of Tunis for good. The Arab armies, which founded Kairouan as their base and religious capital around 670, ended up sidelining old Carthage, which was too exposed to attacks from the sea, and favoured the growth of the better-protected Tunes beside its lake. The city then began to acquire the features that would define its character for a thousand years.
The symbol of this rise is the Zitouna Mosque, the 'mosque of the olive tree', whose origins go back to the 8th century and which was enlarged in the 9th century under the Aghlabid dynasty, the same dynasty that built the Great Mosque of Kairouan. The Zitouna became the spiritual centre of the city and one of the great Islamic universities of the Maghreb, a hub of theological, legal and scientific learning that drew students from across the Muslim world. Many of its columns came from the Roman ruins of Carthage and were reused: the old ancient metropolis was, quite literally, holding up the new Arab city.
Around the mosque the Medina gradually took shape, with its maze of alleys, its souks organised by trade guild and its fountains. Under several dynasties (Aghlabids, Fatimids, Zirids) Tunis grew as a commercial and religious city, though it was not yet a capital. That decisive leap would come in the 13th century, when a new dynasty chose it as the seat of its power and turned it into one of the great capitals of the Islamic Mediterranean.
The great moment for Tunis came with the Hafsid dynasty, which broke away from the Almohad empire in the 13th century and made the city the capital of its kingdom, covering much of present-day Tunisia and neighbouring territories. For the first time, Tunis was not a town in anyone's shadow: it was the centre of political, economic and cultural power for the whole region, and one of the most important capitals of the Islamic Mediterranean.
During more than three centuries of Hafsid rule, most of the heritage that makes the Medina a UNESCO World Heritage Site today was built. Mosques, madrasas (Quranic schools), zawiyas, mausoleums, fondouks (merchants' inns), palaces and fountains went up, and the guild souks that still operate were laid out: the perfume makers', the goldsmiths', the felt-cap makers', the textile sellers'. The Medina was enclosed by walls with monumental gates (bab), several of which survive.
Hafsid Tunis was also a major commercial and intellectual centre. The routes linking Europe, the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa passed through its ports, and jurists and scholars were trained in its madrasas and at the Zitouna university. The historian Ibn Khaldun, one of the most original thinkers of the Middle Ages and regarded as a forerunner of sociology, was born in Tunis in 1332, at the height of Hafsid splendour. The city welcomed Christian merchants (Genoese, Venetians, Catalans) who had their own quarters and consulates.
That splendour, however, also drew the greed of the great Mediterranean powers. In the 16th century, Tunis was caught in the clash between the Spanish Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire, which were fighting for control of North Africa and of trade and piracy in the Mediterranean. The city would change hands several times before finding a new master.
The 16th century turned Tunis into a chessboard in the great Mediterranean struggle. In 1535, Emperor Charles V captured the city and its port of La Goulette to hold back the Ottoman corsair Barbarossa, and installed a garrison there along with a vassal Hafsid king. For decades, Tunis and its harbour fortress were contested between Spain and the Ottomans, with sieges, sackings and shifting allegiances. Finally, in 1574, the Ottomans took definitive control and Tunis became a province of the Ottoman Empire.
Although it nominally answered to Istanbul, Ottoman Tunis soon developed considerable autonomy. Real power ended up in the hands of a local dynasty of hereditary governors, the beys of the Husainid family, who from the 18th century ruled the country almost as independent sovereigns. Under the beys, the city enjoyed a period of stability and prosperity: new palaces were built (some now museums, such as the Bardo itself), along with Ottoman-style mosques with octagonal minarets, and the court took on a cosmopolitan refinement.
Tunis at this time was a diverse city, home to the Muslim majority, a long-established and sizeable Jewish community, and colonies of European Christian merchants and renegades. Corsair activity, the Barbary corsairs, was for a long time a source of income and of tension with the European powers, until international pressure in the 19th century gradually brought it to an end.
That same 19th century brought the first attempts at European-style modernisation (administrative reforms, a pioneering constitution in 1861, the abolition of slavery) but also growing debt owed by the country to the European powers. That debt would be the perfect excuse for France, which already controlled neighbouring Algeria, to take the decisive step and impose its control over Tunisia.
In 1881, taking advantage of Tunisia's debt and a border pretext, France imposed its protectorate over the country through the Treaty of Bardo, signed in the very palace that now houses the great museum. The bey kept his throne as a symbolic figure, but real power passed into French hands. So began a period that would last 75 years and leave a deep mark on the face of the capital.
The French did not destroy the Medina; instead they built a new city beside it, the Ville Nouvelle, with a European layout of straight streets, squares and colonial buildings mixing classicism, Art Nouveau and, later, Art Deco. Its backbone was the great ficus-lined avenue now called Habib Bourguiba, the 'Champs-Élysées of Tunis', with its municipal theatre from 1902 and the Catholic Cathedral of St Vincent de Paul (1897), built opposite the Porte de France, facing the Arab Medina head-on. The city gained a modern port, a railway, trams and a large European population, mostly French and Italian.
Under the protectorate a Tunisian nationalist movement demanding independence also grew strongly. Its key figure was Habib Bourguiba, a French-trained lawyer and leader of the Neo-Destour party, who combined political agitation, prison and negotiation over several decades. After the interlude of the Second World War, when Tunisia was a theatre of the North African campaign between the Axis and the Allies in 1942-1943, nationalist pressure became unstoppable.
Finally, on 20 March 1956, Tunisia gained independence. The following year the beylical monarchy was abolished and a republic was proclaimed, with Bourguiba as its first president. For the first time in its history, the city of Tunis became the capital of a modern, sovereign state.
The independent Tunisia that emerged in 1956 was shaped by Habib Bourguiba, who governed as president for thirty years. Bourguiba drove a deep modernisation that was bold by the region's standards: in 1956 he enacted the Code of Personal Status, which abolished polygamy and gave women rights that were pioneering in the Arab world; he expanded free, secular education; and he bet on a secular, development-focused state. The capital grew, spread towards the lake and the suburbs, and modernised its infrastructure.
In 1987, an elderly and ailing Bourguiba was removed from power in a bloodless coup by his prime minister, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who would rule with an iron fist for 23 years. Under Ben Ali, Tunisia presented the outside world with an image of stability and a thriving tourist destination, but at home an authoritarian regime took hold, with censorship, corruption and political repression.
It all exploded at the end of 2010. The self-immolation of a young street vendor in the inland town of Sidi Bouzid sparked a wave of protests over unemployment, the high cost of living and the lack of freedoms that spread across the whole country. In January 2011, demonstrators filled the capital's Avenue Habib Bourguiba in front of the Ministry of the Interior, and on 14 January Ben Ali fled the country. The Tunisian Revolution had triumphed, and its spark caught fire across the region: it was the beginning of the Arab Spring.
In the years that followed, Tunisia was seen as the only relatively successful democratic transition to come out of that wave, with a new constitution in 2014 and a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for the Tunisian 'National Dialogue Quartet'. Since then the country has gone through serious economic difficulties, political tensions and episodes of terrorism, such as the attack on the Bardo Museum itself in 2015, but the capital remains the living heart of the nation: a city where the age-old Medina and the avenue of revolutions sit side by side, street by street, with their history of Punics, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans and French.
