Three days of Roman Tunisia, then four in the south. The first half is the densest run of classical sites in the country — Carthage, Dougga, Bulla Regia, Thuburbo Majus, the Zaghouan water temple and Uthina — and the second crosses the Chott to the dunes and the Berber ksour before returning through El Jem.
The archaeology is front-loaded on purpose. Days one to three stay within a couple of hours of Tunis and cover six major Roman sites, several of which you will have to yourself. Only then does the route commit to the long southern leg.
Zaghouan is the hinge: you see the spring and the temple that fed Carthage after you have stood in Carthage itself, which is the right order and not the obvious one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ben Arous
A Roman colony settled by veterans, with an amphitheatre built into a slope, enormous cisterns and the foundations of a capitol — and almost nobody there. You can walk into the amphitheatre's passages without a guide or a queue. Close enough to Tunis to be an easy stop and overlooked precisely because it is not on the usual circuit.
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.
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
The Star Wars set built for The Phantom Menace and never taken down, standing in open dunes near Ong Jemal. Domes, doorways and moisture vaporators, weathered by twenty-five years of sand and partly buried by it — the desert is slowly taking it back. Reached by 4x4 across the sand. Ong Jemal itself, the camel-shaped rock nearby, is where the sunrise is worth the early start.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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 town beneath cliffs that are honeycombed with cave dwellings, some still lived in, and the place the Tunisian tradition of the fricassé sandwich is said to come from. It sits on the road between Tataouine and the ridge villages, so it is usually passed through — but the cliffs above the town are worth the ten minutes it costs to stop.
Tataouine
A fortified granary of vaulted cells stacked around courtyards, partly restored and partly not. It was used as the slave quarters of Mos Espa in The Phantom Menace, and the film crew painted parts of it — you can still see where. Even without that it is one of the more atmospheric ksour, because you can walk right through it rather than around it.
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
A Berber village strung along a ridge, mostly abandoned when its people moved to the plain, with a white mosque still standing at the top and cave houses cut into the rock below. Steeper and emptier than Chenini, and quieter for it. From the crest you look across bare hills in every direction and understand why anyone built up here.
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.
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.
No Cap Bon, no Djerba, no far north-west. Seven days reaches the Sahara and the Roman interior and stops there. For the coast and the island as well, the ten-day circuit is the next step up.
7 days / 6 nights · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
Six: Carthage, Dougga, Bulla Regia, Thuburbo Majus, the Zaghouan water temple and Uthina. Dougga and Bulla Regia alone justify the days; the other four are close enough together to add little driving.
On this one more than most. The first three days are archaeology, where a trained guide changes what you see. The southern days are landscape, where the driver is enough.
It can, and then it becomes a shorter Roman circuit — tell us and we will quote it. Most people keep it, because the contrast between Dougga and the Chott is the reason to spend a week rather than three days.
Hotels in Tozeur or Douz, and a night near the ksour. A desert camp can replace one of those; it is quoted with your dates.
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.
