Fifteen days is the length at which nothing has to be left out. Thirty-five stops, and the only circuit we run that stands in all nine of Tunisia's UNESCO World Heritage sites that are open — the tenth, Ichkeul, is closed to visitors, so nine is the ceiling. Tunis to Douz alone is about 426 km, and this goes considerably further in both directions.
A loop with the north done first, while the driving is short and the weather mild, then the long descent through the Roman interior into the Sahara, the ksour country, Djerba, and back up the coast. No road is driven twice.
Two weeks also buys the thing shorter circuits cannot: unhurried mornings. At this length a site gets the time it deserves rather than the time the schedule allows, and there is room to lose an afternoon to weather without losing a stop.
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.
Grand Tunis
A nineteenth-century beylical palace turned museum, and the reason to come is the floors: the largest collection of Roman mosaics anywhere, taken from villas across the country and hung or laid where you can stand over them. Virgil with the two muses, Neptune surrounded by sea creatures, whole hunting scenes lifted from dining rooms. The building competes with the collection — carved ceilings and tiled staircases — which is either a distraction or half the point, depending on you.
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.
Bizerte
Three Ottoman sea forts stand above a lagoon that was a corsair harbour until it silted up. What makes it worth the stop is below them: the ramli gardens, plots cultivated on sand at the water's edge and irrigated by the tide itself, a technique still worked here and almost nowhere else. It is a quiet, half-forgotten place that rewards an hour rather than a photograph.
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.
Nabeul
The only Punic town Rome never rebuilt — it was destroyed in the third century BC and simply left, so what survives is Carthaginian rather than Roman-over-Carthaginian. The streets, drains and house plans are legible, and almost every house has a pink-plastered bath built into it, which tells you something about how these people lived that no monument does. On the coast at Cap Bon, with the sea immediately below the site.
Nabeul
The pottery town, and the workshops are open — you can watch wheels turning and kilns loading rather than only buy the results. The Friday market is one of the largest in the region and sells to locals first. Nabeul sits on Cap Bon between Kerkouane and Hammamet, so it is usually a working stop on a northern loop rather than a day of its own.
Zaghouan
The Romans built a nymphaeum here around the spring that fed Carthage, and then an aqueduct 132 kilometres long to carry the water there. What survives is the temple itself, half-circular against the mountain, with the water still running. Arches of the aqueduct stand in fields for miles afterwards, and once you have seen the source you notice them the whole way back.
Zaghouan
A capitol and a forum standing in open farmland an hour from Tunis, and most days you will not share them with anyone. Less complete than Dougga, but that is rather the point — you can walk the whole site in an hour without queueing for anything, and the columns of the capitol against the wheat make the case better than a fuller site with a car park. Useful as a first or last Roman stop because it is close to the motorway south.
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.
Monastir
The ribat is the oldest of its kind in North Africa and the most complete: an eighth-century coastal fortress of blank walls and a watchtower you climb for the lagoon and the cemetery below. It has stood in for Jerusalem in more than one film, which tells you how little it has changed. The Bourguiba mausoleum sits nearby under gold domes, deliberately grand.
Mahdia
Founded as a Fatimid capital in the tenth century on a cape so narrow the whole city could be defended by one gate — the Skifa el-Kahla, whose tunnel you still walk through to enter the old town. Beyond it a quiet medina of white houses runs out to the cemetery and the point. Silk weaving is still done here. The beaches are the calmest on this coast.
Sfax
The least visited of the great medinas and, partly because of that, the most intact: the walls are complete, the gates still work, and the souks inside sell to people who live there rather than to visitors. Sfax is a working industrial city and makes no effort to charm, which is exactly why an hour inside its walls feels different from an hour inside Sousse.
Médenine
An island of low white villages rather than a resort strip, once you leave the hotel zone. El Ghriba is among the oldest synagogues in Africa and still in use, evidence of a Jewish community here for well over a thousand years. The settlement pattern of scattered fortified farmsteads, mosques and cisterns is what UNESCO inscribed, so the island itself is the monument rather than any one building on it.
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.
Tataouine
The best-kept ksar in the south: four storeys of vaulted grain cells stacked around two courtyards, reached by stairs built into the walls with no rail. Each cell belonged to a family and held their harvest, which is why the whole thing is built like a fortress. Standing in the lower courtyard looking up is the shot everyone takes, and it is still worth taking.
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.
Gabès
A stone village spilling down both sides of a gorge in the mountains above the Matmata plateau, on the old road between the hills and the sea. Weaving is still done here and the blankets on the walls are made locally rather than imported for the stop. The reason to come is the road itself and the view down the wadi from the village, which opens out towards the coastal plain.
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.
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.
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.
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 gorge with sheer walls dropping straight from the village edge, right on the Algerian frontier. The old village sits on the lip of it and is largely empty; you walk to the rim and the ground simply stops. It has been filmed more than once, and the light in the late afternoon is what people come back for.
Tozeur
The largest of the mountain oases, with the abandoned old town on one side of the wadi and the new one on the other. The waterfall runs year-round, which in this landscape is startling, and the canyon below it is deep enough to change the temperature. Between Chebika and Mides on the piste along the Algerian border.
Tozeur
A mountain oasis at the foot of a bare ridge, where a spring runs out of a narrow gorge and falls into palms below. The old village was abandoned after floods in 1969 and left standing, so you walk up through empty stone houses to the water. First of the three mountain oases and the easiest to reach; the walk to the falls takes twenty minutes.
People with two clear weeks who would rather see a country than a highlights reel, and who are comfortable changing hotel most nights — this is a touring holiday, not a base with excursions. If that sounds like too much movement, the ten-day circuit covers the same spine with fewer stops and longer stays.
15 days / 14 nights · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
Every one that is open. Tunisia has ten inscribed properties; Ichkeul National Park is closed to visitors, so nine is the most any honest itinerary can include, and this reaches all nine.
Less per day than on the shorter ones, which is the point. The distance is greater but it is spread over twice the days, so most mornings are two hours or less between stops.
Yes, and most people should. Djerba and Tozeur are the usual places to stop moving for a day. Tell us when you book so the hotels are booked for two nights rather than one.
It is longer than most people take, but the country is bigger than it looks on a map: Tabarka to Tataouine is about 600 km. Fifteen days is what it takes to see the north, the Sahara and the island without rushing any of them.
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.
