Tunisia in seven days, from Carthage to the Sahara

Settling in

The week begins quietly: you reach your hotel in Tunis, and the rest of the day is yours. Dinner is at the hotel. If you would like us to collect you at Tunis–Carthage airport, ask — an airport transfer is a separate service and is not part of this tour price.

Old Tunis on foot

Entrance included

A walking tour of the medina, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979: the Zitouna, the great mosque at its centre, the covered souks around it, the fondouks that housed caravan traders, and the elegant Place du Gouvernement where the old city meets the French-built Ville Nouvelle.

The Bardo National Museum

Entrance included

The Bardo holds one of the world’s great collections of Roman mosaics, taken from villas across the country and laid out in the rooms of a former beylical palace. It is the single best preparation for every Roman site later in the week.

Carthage: Byrsa, the Tophet and the ports

Entrance included

Byrsa Hill was the acropolis and the first Phoenician settlement. From there the day follows the Punic city: the Tophet, a funerary sanctuary of Baal and Tanit whose purpose Roman writers described in the most hostile terms possible, and the circular and rectangular Punic ports, still readable in the shoreline.

The Antonine Baths

Entrance included

Roman Carthage at the water’s edge: the bath complex stands on the shore itself, with the Gulf of Tunis behind it.

Sidi Bou Saïd at the end of the day

Entrance included

The clifftop village above the gulf, white walls and blue grilles, with a walk up to the marabout of Abou Saïd al-Baji and the lighthouse. Mint tea with pine nuts at the Café des Nattes is yours to pay for.

Testour, built by Andalusian exiles

Entrance included

Narrow lanes, traditional houses, an old hammam and the Andalusian mosques — above all the Great Mosque on the central square, the finest Morisco building in the country. Testouri cheese is sold a few steps away.

Dougga, at least two hours

UNESCO World Heritage · 1997Entrance included

A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1997 and, in UNESCO’s own words, the best-preserved small Roman town in North Africa. The Capitol, the theatre, the baths, the market, the streets between them, and the Libyco-Punic mausoleum that predates the Roman town.

Bulla Regia and its underground villas

Entrance included

Bulla Regia is unique in Tunisia: its wealthy residents built a whole storey below ground to escape the summer heat, and those rooms survive with their mosaics in place. The House of Amphitrite, the House of the Hunt and the House of the New Hunt are the ones to see, along with the Julia Domna baths and the theatre.

Chemtou and its marble quarries

Entrance included

The Numidian-Roman site of Chemtou sits beside the quarries that supplied the empire with Numidian yellow marble. You can still see the cut faces and the blocks that were never shipped.

The medina of Kairouan

UNESCO World Heritage · 1988Entrance included

A walk through the old medina, past weaving workshops where textiles are still made on traditional looms, and the bakeries that turn out makroudh and the rest of Kairouan’s sweets. Scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark were filmed in these streets.

The Great Mosque and the Mosque of the Barber

Entrance included

The Great Mosque, founded in 670, is the oldest in North Africa and the model for many that followed. A short drive away, the Zaouia of Sidi Sahab — known as the Mosque of the Barber — is all tilework and carved plaster, and far more decorated.

The Aghlabid Basins

Entrance included

Two linked circular reservoirs built to settle and store the city’s water. Plain engineering, beautiful geometry.

Tozeur: brickwork, souks and the oasis

Entrance included

The long drive south ends in the Jerid. You wander the lanes of the old quarter to see the relief brickwork, the souks and the date market, then go into the palm grove itself — by horse-drawn carriage, included — to see how the irrigation has been divided for centuries.

Chebika

Entrance included

The first of the mountain oases, reached by 4x4. The spring surfaces at the foot of a bare cliff and the palms follow the water into the gorge; the abandoned village sits on the slope above.

Tamerza

Entrance included

A Roman and later Byzantine frontier post at the head of a long canyon, with the ruins of the old village facing the new one across the wadi.

Nefta, the Corbeille and Mos Espa

Entrance included

Nefta — Roman Nepte — is one of the great centres of Sufism in Tunisia, with scores of shrines and mosques, and the Corbeille: a crater-like hollow filled with palms and fed by springs along its rim. The dunes at Ong Jemel nearby hold what remains of the Mos Espa film set.

Chott el Jerid

The causeway across the largest salt flat in Tunisia, roughly 5,000 km². We stop for photographs where the crust changes colour and the heat turns the horizon into water that is not there.

Douz, the market square and the dunes

Entrance included

Douz is an oasis town known for its dates and for being the last stop before the sand. The market square is the centre of it; the dunes are a few minutes away and best at sunset.

A troglodyte home in Matmata

Entrance included

Into the Matmata mountains, Berber country, where houses are circular pits dug into the rock with rooms cut sideways from a sunken courtyard. You visit a family home, and the most famous pit of all — now the Hotel Sidi Driss — which was used as a film set in the original 1977 Star Wars.

The amphitheatre of El Jem

UNESCO World Heritage · 1979Entrance included

Back on the plain, the Roman amphitheatre of Thysdrus: 148 by 122 metres, built of cut stone on flat ground, with seating for around 35,000. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979 and the largest in Africa.

Sousse, on the sea

Entrance included

The week ends on the coast at Sousse, ancient Hadrumetum, whose medina has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1988 — ramparts, ribat, Great Mosque and kasbah in one walled circuit. An evening walk is the right way to see it.

Transfer for your flight

After breakfast, the drive back north and your transfer to the airport. Tell us your flight time when you book and we plan the morning around it.