Tunis travel guide

Top 10 sights in Tunis

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Calips · CC BY 2.5

   Carthage

   A Phoenician city founded from Tyre, by tradition in 814 BC, which grew into Rome's only serious rival in the western Mediterranean. Rome levelled it in 146 BC, refounded it as a colony, and it became the second city of the western empire; the ruins are World Heritage.

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2. 

   2© Herbert Frank from Wien (Vienna), AT · CC BY 2.0

   Bardo National Museum

   A museum in a nineteenth-century palace of the beys, opened in 1888 and holding the largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world, most of them lifted from villas across Tunisia. Gunmen attacked it in 2015; it reopened with the rooms rearranged.

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3. 

   3© Citizen59 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Al-Zaytunah Mosque

   The oldest mosque in Tunis, founded in the eighth century and rebuilt many times, its prayer hall carried on columns taken from the ruins of Carthage. The teaching circle that grew here was among the first universities in the Islamic world.

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   Medina of Tunis

   The walled old city of Tunis, World Heritage since 1979, holding some seven hundred monuments — palaces, mosques, tombs, madrasas and fountains — laid down between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries around the great mosque.

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5. 

   5© upyernoz · CC BY 2.0

   Byrsa

   The citadel hill of Punic Carthage, where Dido is said to have bought as much land as an oxhide would cover and then cut the hide into strips. The Romans sheared the top off to build their forum; Punic houses survive on the slope below.

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6. 

   6© Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Cathedral of St. Vincent de Paul

   Catholic cathedral of Tunis, built in 1897 on the site of a Christian cemetery. It faces the French embassy across the avenue Bourguiba and serves a small resident community.

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   7

   Hammouda Pacha Mosque

   A seventeenth-century mosque in the medina of Tunis built by an Ottoman governor, with an octagonal minaret and a marble courtyard. It was raised for the Hanafi rite, which the Ottomans brought and which remains rare in Tunisia.

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8. 

   8© Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Saint Louis Cathedral

   A cathedral built on the Byrsa hill between 1884 and 1890 and dedicated to Louis IX, who died on this shore during the crusade of 1270. It has not been a church since 1964 and is now used for concerts, above the ruins.

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   9

   Sidi Mahrez Mosque

   The only Ottoman-style mosque in Tunis, built between 1692 and 1698 by Muhammad Bey al-Muradi, with five white domes over a square plan — the Istanbul manner rather than the North African one. It is named after the tenth-century patron saint of the city.

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10. 

    10© Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Antonine baths

    The largest Roman baths in Africa and among the three largest in the empire, built between AD 145 and 162 on the shore. Only the basement service level survives, but its columns give the scale of what stood above.

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   1

   Punic ports of Carthage

   The two harbours of Punic Carthage — a rectangular merchant basin and, behind it, a circular naval one that ancient writers say held over two hundred warships in covered sheds. They survive as shallow lagoons with the outline still legible.

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2. 

   2© Citizen59 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Carthage Palace

   The residence and office of the president of Tunisia, on the coast fifteen kilometres from the capital and next to the ancient ruins. A villa by Le Corbusier stands in the grounds.

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3. 

   3© Neil Rickards · CC BY 2.0

   Carthage amphitheatre

   A Roman amphitheatre of the first century at Carthage, among the largest in the empire and remembered as the place where Perpetua and Felicity were killed in 203. Medieval travellers still wrote about its size; the arena and some vaults remain.

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4. 

   4© Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Bab El Bhar

   The gate on the eastern side of the medina, called the sea gate and, under the protectorate, the gate of France. It marks the seam between the walled old city and the nineteenth-century grid beyond it, and its present arch with a crenellated parapet dates from 1848.

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   5

   Bab Souika

   One of the gates of the Tunis medina, which served as the market gate and guarded the roads to Bizerte, El Kef and Beja. The surrounding quarter carries its name, and the square in front is one of the busier meeting points outside the walls.

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   6

   Great Synagogue of Tunis

   An art deco synagogue on Avenue de la Liberté, built in the 1930s after the old Jewish quarter of the medina was cleared. It remains the main synagogue of a community that once numbered a hundred thousand.

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7. 

   7© Citizen59 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Youssef Dey Mosque

   The first mosque in Tunis built in Ottoman style, converted in 1631 by the ruler whose name it carries. Its octagonal minaret was a novelty in a city of square ones, and set the pattern for those that followed.

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   8

   Kasbah Mosque

   A mosque built between 1230 and 1233 as the Friday mosque of the citadel, for the first ruler of the Hafsid dynasty. Its minaret, patterned in glazed tile, was the model for later towers across the region.

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9. 

   9© م ض · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Bab Saadoun

   Gate of the medina of Tunis, built in 1350 and rebuilt in 1881. The horse market was held before it; the gate now stands isolated on a traffic island.

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10. 

    10© DrFO.Jr.Tn · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Bab Jedid

    One of the gates of the Tunis medina, its name meaning the new gate. It is among the gates first raised under the Hafsids, and the blacksmiths' souk beside it has given it the alternative name of the smiths' gate.

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