Explore Tunisia

Tunis

The capital's medina is a UNESCO-listed warren of some 700 monuments, souks still sorted by trade, and the Zitouna Mosque at its centre. Out at the Bardo, a former beylical palace holds the largest collection of Roman mosaics anywhere on earth — floors lifted from villas across the country and reassembled wall to wall.

Sidi Bou Saïd

A village of whitewashed walls and cobalt-blue doors on a cliff above the Gulf of Tunis, built around the shrine of a 13th-century Sufi master. Paul Klee and August Macke came in 1914 and it changed how they painted; UNESCO finally inscribed the place in 2026.

Carthage

What Rome spent three wars destroying and then rebuilt as the empire's second city in the west. The Punic layers on Byrsa Hill sit beneath Roman baths, cisterns and an amphitheatre, and the Tophet — where the Carthaginians buried urns of infant remains — is still argued over by archaeologists.

Djerba

An island of low white houses, fortified mosques and olive groves, joined to the mainland by a Roman causeway. El Ghriba is among the oldest synagogues in the world and still draws an annual Jewish pilgrimage; the island's whole settlement pattern was inscribed by UNESCO in 2023.

Sousse

A beach city with a serious medina attached — ribat, kasbah and city walls raised in the 9th century when this was the Aghlabid navy's home port. The ribat's watchtower was built for spotting Byzantine ships and now does duty as the best view in town.

Hammamet

Tunisia's original resort town, where jasmine grows over the walls and the 15th-century kasbah looks down on a curve of sand. The gardens of Dar Sebastian, built by a Romanian millionaire in the 1920s, drew everyone from Churchill to Klee.

El Jem

A Roman amphitheatre rising out of an unremarkable market town, seating 35,000 and the third largest ever built. It survived largely because the town was too small to quarry it away, and in summer it hosts a symphonic music festival under the arches.

Kairouan

The fourth holiest city in Islam and the first Arab settlement in the Maghreb, founded in 670. The Great Mosque of Uqba set the template for North African mosque design — a vast courtyard, a squat square minaret, and columns scavenged from Roman ruins across the region.

Tozeur

A date-palm oasis on the edge of the great salt flat, its old quarter built from ochre bricks laid in geometric relief patterns found nowhere else. It is the usual base for the mountain oases at Chebika and Tamerza and for the Star Wars sets still standing in the sand nearby.

Douz

Billed as the gateway to the Sahara, and the last real town before the dunes take over. The International Festival of the Sahara each December fills it with camel racing, Bedouin poetry and saluki hounds.

Matmata

A village where Berber families dug their homes down into the earth — circular pits with rooms cut into the walls, cool through the summer. One of them played Luke Skywalker's boyhood home and has been a hotel ever since.

Monastir

Habib Bourguiba's home town, which is why it has an airport, a grand mausoleum with gilded domes and a marina. The ribat is the oldest in North Africa and stood in for Jerusalem in Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Dougga

The best-preserved Roman town in North Africa, spread across a hillside of olive groves with its theatre, capitol and forum largely intact. A Numidian mausoleum stands among the ruins, predating the Romans by two centuries.

Tabarka

A north-coast town under cork oak hills, with a Genoese fort on an islet and the red coral that has been fished here since antiquity. The reefs and drop-offs make it Tunisia's main diving base, and the jazz festival has run since 1973.

Mahdia

A fishing town on a narrow peninsula, founded as the first Fatimid capital in 921 and entered through a single colossal gate cut into the rock. The beaches north of town are the quietest of the coastal resorts.

Chott el Djerid

A salt lake the size of a small country, dry and blinding white for most of the year, crossed by a causeway that seems to float. Mirages here are reliable enough that the road has become a stop in its own right.

Tataouine

The southern town that lent its name to a desert planet, surrounded by ksour — fortified granaries of stacked vaulted cells built by Berber communities to store grain. Ksar Ouled Soltane is the most photographed of them.

Bizerte

The northernmost city in Africa, with an old port of pastel houses and fishing boats under a Spanish fort. It was the last patch of Tunisia the French left, holding the naval base until 1963, seven years after independence.

Ksar Ghilane

A spring-fed oasis at the edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, where a Roman fort marks the empire's desert limit. People come to sleep in tented camps and to swim in warm water with dunes on every side.

Kerkouane

The only Punic town anywhere that was never built over — abandoned around 250 BC and left alone, so its street plan, drains and pink bathtubs survive as the Carthaginians laid them out. Nothing else gives a clearer picture of how they actually lived.

Founded by Phoenicians from Tyre in the 9th century BC, razed by Rome in 146 BC, then rebuilt as the empire's second city in the western Mediterranean. The Punic ports, Byrsa Hill, the Antonine baths and the Tophet are scattered across a modern suburb of Tunis, which is part of what makes the site so hard to protect.

Built around 238 AD in what was then Thysdrus, a town grown rich on olive oil, and seating some 35,000 — the third largest amphitheatre the Romans ever raised. Its survival owes much to the town shrinking afterwards, leaving no one with the means to carry the stone away.

From the 12th to the 16th century Tunis was among the greatest cities in the Islamic world, and some 700 monuments survive inside the walls — palaces, mosques, madrasas and fountains. The souks are still arranged by trade, with the perfumers closest to the Zitouna Mosque and the noisier crafts pushed to the edge.

The first Arab city in the Maghreb, founded in 670, and the fourth holiest in Islam. The Great Mosque of Uqba fixed the North African mosque type — huge courtyard, squat square minaret, hypostyle prayer hall on columns taken from Roman ruins — and the Aghlabid cisterns outside town still show how a desert city watered itself.

A hillside town of 65 hectares, begun as the Numidian capital and made Roman without ever being flattened first. The theatre, capitol and forum stand nearly complete among olive trees, and the Libyco-Punic mausoleum beside them carries one of the key bilingual inscriptions for deciphering the Numidian language.

Tunisia's most recent inscription, added at the 48th session in July 2026. An 18th-century village of white walls and blue joinery grown around the shrine of the Sufi saint Abou Said al-Baji, its palette was later codified by the French painter Rodolphe d'Erlanger and has been protected by law ever since.

A rare surviving example of a fortified Arab coastal town from the first centuries of Islam, laid out when this was the main naval base of the Aghlabid dynasty. The ribat combined monastery and garrison, and its tower doubled as both minaret and lookout for Byzantine ships.

Inscribed in 2023 not for a single monument but for how the whole island was settled — a dispersed pattern of walled farmsteads, fortified mosques and shared cisterns worked out over centuries on land with almost no fresh water. Muslim, Jewish and Ibadi communities have lived within it side by side.

Abandoned around 250 BC during the First Punic War and, uniquely, never resettled or built over. The result is the only Phoenician-Punic town whose original plan survives intact, down to the drainage and the pink-plastered baths in ordinary houses.

A lake, marsh and limestone massif forming the last link in a chain of North African wetlands, wintering hundreds of thousands of migratory birds. Dams built on its feeder rivers cut the freshwater inflow so badly that it sat on the List of World Heritage in Danger from 1996 to 2006.