Twenty stops in eight days, and it is a true loop — out through the Andalusian north and Cap Bon, down the western side to the Sahara, along the ksour country to Djerba, then back up the coast through El Jem to Carthage. More ground than any other eight-day circuit we run, at the cost of fewer hours at each stop.
The loop exists so that no road is driven twice. It goes out through Testour and Dougga, cuts east to Cap Bon for Kerkouane and Nabeul, then turns south through Kairouan for the desert. The return runs up the eastern side through Djerba and El Jem, arriving in Tunis at the end rather than the beginning.
That last decision is the reason to take this one: Carthage and Sidi Bou Saïd land on day eight, after you have seen the Punic town at Kerkouane that Rome never rebuilt. The comparison is the whole point, and it only works in that order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nabeul
A small walled medina on the sand with a kasbah at the corner of the ramparts, and the walk along the top of the walls gives you the beach on one side and the roofs on the other. The old town is compact enough to see properly in an hour. It is where this company is based, so it is also the most common starting point for circuits heading north to Cap Bon or south to the desert.
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
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Twenty stops in eight days means shorter stops. This circuit does not include Sbeitla, Bulla Regia gets a morning rather than a long look, and there is no second night in the deep desert. If you would rather stand still for longer in fewer places, the 8-day Tunisia tour covers the Roman interior properly and skips Cap Bon and the island.
8 days / 7 nights · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
Coverage rather than depth. The Grand Loop adds Cap Bon, Kerkouane, the ksour around Tataouine and Djerba, and gives up Sbeitla, Sousse and the longer archaeological stops to fit them in.
It is worth the stop rather than a full day. What UNESCO inscribed on Djerba is the settlement pattern — scattered fortified farmsteads, mosques and cisterns — so the island itself is the monument, and driving across it is most of seeing it.
Six: Dougga, Kerkouane, Kairouan, Djerba, El Jem, and Carthage with Sidi Bou Saïd and the Tunis medina at the end.
Yes, and the loop is well suited to it — starting on the coast puts Cap Bon on the first morning instead of the second. The route is rotated rather than reversed, so nothing is lost.
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.
