Ten days is the shortest circuit that reaches the whole country without making a chore of it. Twenty stops: the Punic and Roman north, the holy city of Kairouan, the salt lake and the dunes, and the coast on the way back. Two days shorter than the fortnight and noticeably less packed than the eight.
North first, south in the middle, coast on the return. The long transit day is placed where there is least to miss, so the hours in the car buy the desert rather than costing a site.
Ten days is also the point at which a night in the deep south stops being a rush: you arrive with an afternoon rather than an evening, which is the difference between seeing the Chott and driving past it.
Grand Tunis
Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, then rebuilt it a century later as the capital of its African province, so what you walk through is two cities on one site. The Antonine Baths sit right on the shore — the columns still standing give the scale of a bath house that served a city of hundreds of thousands. Up on Byrsa hill are the Punic foundations and the view that explains why anyone built here at all, with the Gulf of Tunis on one side and the lagoon on the other. The circular naval harbour is now a quiet pond in a residential street, which is its own kind of ending.
Grand Tunis
A village of white walls and blue doors on the cliff above the Gulf of Tunis, twenty minutes from Carthage and usually visited with it. The blue-and-white rule is not folklore invented for visitors: it was imposed in the early twentieth century and has been kept since. Come early or late if you can — the main street is narrow and it fills. Worth the climb to the top for the view back over the bay, and the studded doors are the thing to look at closely, since no two are cut the same.
Grand Tunis
A working medina rather than a preserved one: around seven hundred monuments inside it, and shops that are still trading rather than staging. The Zitouna Mosque is the anchor, and the souks around it are still grouped by trade — perfume in one lane, chèchias in another, gold in a third. It rewards losing the thread a little. If you only have an hour, the stretch between Bab Bhar and the Zitouna is the densest, and the rooftop terraces above the carpet shops give you the medina from above.
Bizerte
The oldest port in the country and the northernmost city in Africa. The old harbour is a small rectangle of water between two forts, still working, with fishing boats tied up where they have always been and the kasbah wall rising straight out of the quay. Walk the ramparts, then the fish market beside them. The beaches north of town are among the best in Tunisia and almost nobody outside the country has heard of them.
Jendouba
A Genoese fort on a rock joined to the shore, cork oak forests running back into the hills behind, and the rock needles — Les Aiguilles — standing out of the sea at the edge of town. This coast was a coral fishery for centuries and still supplies the jewellers. Greener and cooler than anywhere else in the country, which is startling if you have come up from the south.
Jendouba
The Romans here did something they did almost nowhere else: they built the living rooms underground. The summers in this valley are brutal, so the villas have a whole storey below ground level, and because those rooms were buried they survived. You walk down into them and the mosaic floors are still where they were laid — the Amphitrite mosaic in particular is in the room it was made for, not behind glass in a museum. Few visitors get here, so you often have the houses to yourself.
Béja
The best-preserved Roman town in North Africa, and it is not close. A whole town rather than a monument: the Capitol standing nearly full height, a theatre cut into the slope that still seats three thousand, streets, latrines, brothel, market, cisterns. The Libyco-Punic mausoleum at the lower edge is older than the Roman town around it and is one of the few substantial pieces of Numidian architecture left anywhere. It sits alone in farmland, so the setting has not been built over.
Béja
Founded by Andalusian Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, and it still looks it: the street plan, the tiled minaret and the brickwork belong to a different tradition from the towns around it. The clock on the minaret runs anticlockwise, which is the detail everyone repeats and is genuinely there. A short stop on the way to Dougga rather than a destination in itself.
Kairouan
The fourth holy city of Islam and the oldest Muslim city in North Africa. The Great Mosque is a plain fortress from outside and a forest of columns within, most of them taken from Roman and Byzantine buildings — you can still read the reuse. Non-Muslim visitors can enter the courtyard, not the prayer hall. The Aghlabid basins on the edge of town are ninth-century reservoirs, open and circular, still holding water. Dress covered here; it is a working religious city, not a monument.
Kasserine
Sufetula has something almost no other Roman site has: three temples side by side, one each for Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, instead of the usual single capitol. They stand together at the end of the forum behind a triumphal arch, and the effect is hard to photograph and easy to remember. Byzantine churches were built over the town later, so you get two periods stacked. It sits on the road between Kairouan and the desert, which is why it appears on circuits heading south.
Mahdia
The amphitheatre is the third largest that survives and the most complete thing the Romans left in Africa — room for something like thirty-five thousand people in a town that now has far fewer. What makes it worth the stop rather than the photograph is that you can go down into the underground passages where animals and fighters were held and come up into the arena the way they did. It stands directly in the town, so it arrives without warning above the rooftops.
Sousse
The ribat is the reason to stop: a ninth-century fortified monastery, austere and almost empty inside, with a watchtower you can climb for the medina roofs and the sea. The kasbah museum holds one of the best mosaic collections in the country. The medina below is a working one and busier than Tunis at street level. Sousse is on the coast road, so it costs little detour on a run between the capital and El Jem.
Tozeur
An oasis town whose old quarter is built from projecting brickwork — the bricks are laid to stand proud of the wall in geometric patterns, so the facades read like textile. The palm grove behind the town is fed by springs and is worked, not decorative; a calèche ride through it is the usual way to see the scale. Tozeur is the base for the mountain oases and the film sets, and the last real town before the salt lake.
Tozeur
An oasis town built around the Corbeille, a natural bowl of palms sunk below the streets, fed by springs and best seen from the rim early. Nefta has been a centre of Sufi learning for centuries and holds dozens of domed shrines, so the skyline is white cupolas above green. Quieter and older in feeling than Tozeur, twenty minutes away.
Tozeur
A salt lake the size of a small country, crossed on a causeway built straight across the middle. In summer it is dry and blinding white; after rain it holds a film of water and mirrors the sky, and the far shore appears to float. The colours shift with the mineral content — pinks and rust in patches that look artificial in photographs and are not. Stop, get out, walk on the crust a little way. It is the strangest half hour on any southern circuit.
Kébili
Where the tarmac ends and the Grand Erg Oriental begins, which is why it is called the gate of the desert. The dunes start at the edge of town, so you are on sand within minutes rather than after an hour of driving. Camels go out from here in the late afternoon, when the light is worth having and the heat has gone. The Thursday market is a real regional market rather than a tourist one.
Kébili
A true desert oasis at the edge of the great sand sea, reached by piste, with a hot spring that runs warm all year into a pool under the palms. Camps here are permanent rather than improvised, and the reason to stay is the night: no town within reach means no light, and the sky is the point. The Roman fort of Tisavar sits out in the sand nearby, which tells you the frontier once ran through here.
Tataouine
The town at the centre of the ksour country, surrounded by fortified granaries in the hills. The name is the one George Lucas borrowed, though the film sets themselves are elsewhere. Useful as the base for reaching Chenini, Douiret and Ksar Ouled Soltane, all of which are within a short drive and none of which are on a bus route.
Tataouine
A Berber village stacked along a ridge, with cave dwellings cut into the rock below a white mosque at the crest. It is still partly inhabited. The climb up is steep and worth it, and from the top you look across at the ruined ksar on the opposite spur. Of the ridge villages around Tataouine this is the one that gives the clearest picture of how the defensive settlements worked.
Gabès
The houses are dug down into the ground rather than built on it — a central pit for a courtyard, rooms cut horizontally into its walls, cool in summer and warm in winter. Some are still lived in. Sidi Driss, now a hotel, was the Lars homestead in the first Star Wars film and has kept the set dressing. The landscape above ground is bare and lunar, which is presumably what recommended it.
Against the eight-day tour: two more days, more time at each stop rather than more stops. Against the fifteen: this gives up Cap Bon, the far north-west and Djerba.
10 days / 9 nights · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
For the main spine of the country, comfortably. It covers Carthage and Tunis, the Roman cities, Kairouan, the Chott and the dunes, and the Sahel coast. It does not reach Cap Bon, Tabarka or Djerba.
Six of the nine that are open to visitors. The three it misses are the ones on Cap Bon, the island and the far north-west, which need the fifteen-day circuit.
A hotel in Tozeur or Douz on the southern nights. A desert camp can be added if you want a night under the sky — tell us when you book, because the camp is quoted with your dates.
Yes. The loop is rotated rather than reversed, so nothing is lost — the first and last days simply change places.
Distances are straight-line, measured between the coordinates on our map of the sites; road distances are longer. Prices are per vehicle and come from the same database the 34 tours and 1,392 transfer fares.
