Tunis

Tunis's medina, founded in the ninth century and UNESCO-listed since 1979, is organised the way old Arab medinas traditionally were: each souk named for and dedicated to a single trade, radiating out from the Zitouna Mosque at the centre. The Souk el Attarine (perfumes and essences) sits closest to the mosque, historically the most prestigious position; the Souk el Berka (jewellery, once the site of the city's slave market) and the Souk Sidi Mahrez (textiles) extend the pattern further out. The great gates — Bab el Bhar (Sea Gate, marking the old boundary with the French-built new town) and Bab Saadoun — still frame how the medina reads against the modern city around it. Walking it rewards a slow morning more than a checklist: the covered alleys shift character block by block, from tourist-facing carpet and leather stalls near the main entrances to genuinely local hardware, spice and clothing trade the further in a visitor goes.

The Bardo, housed in a former Hafsid-era palace on the city's western edge, holds the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics — not a display of decorative art so much as a documentary record of Roman North African life, in hunting scenes, mythological cycles and agricultural labour rendered in tessellated stone at a level of preservation few Mediterranean sites can match. The Virgil mosaic, showing the poet flanked by two muses, is widely considered one of the finest surviving portraits of a classical author anywhere. Many of the museum's major pieces were lifted directly from villa floors at Dougga, Bulla Regia and Thuburbo Majus, which makes a Bardo visit a genuinely useful anchor for a wider Roman-site trip — either as orientation before seeing the sites themselves, or afterward, to see what the sites no longer hold in place.

Carthage, immediately north of central Tunis, spreads its Roman-era ruins across a modern residential suburb rather than a single fenced site: Byrsa Hill (with the National Museum and panoramic views over the bay), the Antonine Baths directly on the sea, the excavated Punic ports, and the Tophet sanctuary are all reached by a short taxi or the TGM light rail, spread widely enough that a full circuit takes a half-day. Immediately above Carthage, the cliffside village of Sidi Bou Saïd is built entirely in blue-and-white Andalusian style — a look protected by local ordinance since the 1920s — with steep cobbled lanes, the eighteenth-century Café des Nattes, and views over the Gulf of Tunis that make it one of the most photographed places in the Mediterranean. Both are straightforward to combine in a single day from central Tunis via the TGM.

Tunis's northern suburbs — La Marsa's beach and café strip, and the purpose-built lake district of Berges du Lac — give the city a genuinely comfortable modern counterpart to the medina's density. The TGM light rail (Tunis–Goulette–Marsa), running since 1872 and one of the oldest electrified rail lines in Africa, connects all three northern stops — Carthage, Sidi Bou Saïd, La Marsa — directly from the city centre, making a car unnecessary for the whole northern circuit. La Marsa's seafront promenade and cafés fill up in the evening with a genuinely local crowd rather than a tourist one, a useful counterpoint to a day spent in the medina's more visitor-facing stretches.