Eight days, fifteen stops, six of them UNESCO World Heritage sites. The circuit runs down the spine of the country: the Punic and Roman north first, then Kairouan and the late-Roman interior, then the salt lake and the dunes, coming back through the troglodyte villages. Tunis to Douz alone is about 426 km, which is why this is eight days and not four.
The order is not arbitrary. The Roman sites cluster in the north and west, so they come first while you are fresh and the driving is short. Kairouan and Sbeitla bridge the middle of the country. Then the long southern leg, which is done in one push because there is little worth stopping for between Sbeitla and Tozeur, and the reward is arriving at the Chott with the afternoon still in front of you.
Matmata comes last on the way back north rather than first, because the underground houses read better after you have seen the country they are hiding from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No Cap Bon, no Kerkouane, no Djerba, and no ksour around Tataouine. Eight days is not enough for all of it, and the choice here is depth in the Roman interior over breadth along the coast. If the ksour and the island are what you came for, the Grand Loop covers those instead and gives up Sbeitla and Sousse to do it.
8 days / 7 nights · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
Most days are two to four hours in the car, broken by stops. The exception is the run south from Sbeitla to Tozeur, which is the long one, and it is deliberately placed on a day with few sites so the time in the vehicle buys something.
Six of the fifteen: Carthage, Sidi Bou Saïd, the Tunis medina, Dougga, Kairouan, El Jem and the medina of Sousse are all inscribed. That is most of what Tunisia has that is currently open to visitors.
The direction can, and sometimes should — starting from Hammamet or Sousse rather than Tunis shifts the first and last days. Individual stops can be dropped for more time elsewhere. Tell us before the day rather than on it, because the hotels are booked to the route.
The driver is included; a licensed guide is an option at €60 for the group. On this circuit it earns its keep at Carthage, Dougga and El Jem in particular.
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.
