Tunisia end to end by hired car, following the water: a lake north of Bizerte whose flow reverses twice a year and is now held in balance by a gate, vegetable plots grown on sand and watered by the tide, Roman towns that lived on cisterns, ninth-century reservoirs at Kairouan, an oasis still divided by a thirteenth-century share-out, and finally the salt pan where the water stops.
Tunis, the medina
The medina grew around the Zitouna mosque from the eighth century, was listed by UNESCO in 1979, and holds something like seven hundred monuments inside a quarter that is still a working wholesale market rather than a preserved one. Go in at Bab Bhar and climb the covered souks towards the mosque, then come out on the far side into the French grid of the 1880s, which is a different city with a different argument about itself.
Carthage and Sidi Bou Saïd
The TGM light railway leaves from Tunis Marine and stops at Carthage in pieces — Salammbô for the tophet, Byrsa for the hill and the museum, Hannibal for the Antonine baths on the shore. Almost everything upright is Roman, because Rome destroyed the Punic city in 146 BC and rebuilt on the site a century later. The tophet, where thousands of urns of cremated infants and animals were buried, is the substantial Punic thing left, and what exactly was happening there is still contested by people who have read the same evidence. Sidi Bou Saïd is two stops further up the line and worth the climb from the station, with the caveat that the blue and white is not vernacular: it was pushed onto the village in the early twentieth century by Rodolphe d'Erlanger, the French painter and musicologist who lived there, and a 1915 decree fixed the palette in law, which makes it one of the older protected townscapes anywhere and also a designed one.
The Bardo, then north to Bizerte
The Bardo holds the largest collection of Roman mosaic anywhere, in a nineteenth-century beylical palace. It closed for over two years after July 2021 and reopened on 14 September 2023 with parts of it still shut, so check before building a morning around a particular room. Then drive north-west past Utica, a Phoenician port now several kilometres from any sea because the Medjerda filled its bay with its own silt, and on to Bizerte, which sits about fifteen kilometres short of Cap Angela, the northernmost point of mainland Africa.
Ichkeul
Forty minutes south-west. The lake is fed by six wadis and drains through one, the Oued Tinja, into Lake Bizerte and the sea — and in summer that drain runs backwards. Park at the foot of Jebel Ichkeul, walk up to the eco-museum for the hydrology boards, carry on to the old hot spring, and take the marsh track with binoculars: between about November and March this is one of the largest wintering grounds for waterfowl in North Africa. Stop at the Tinja sluice on the way back. It is a small concrete structure across a channel, and it is the reason the lake is still here.
Ghar El Melh, then inland to Testour
Ghar El Melh was a corsair port; three forts went up around the harbour in the 1640s and the harbour then silted shut, which ended the piracy more effectively than any treaty. Behind the lagoon are the ramli plots — vegetables grown on sand banked to a precise height above the water table, watered by a lens of rainwater floating on seawater that the tide lifts into the root zone twice a day. No pump, no channel, no irrigation of any kind. The FAO made the ramli a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2020 — Tunisia's second, after the Gafsa oases in 2011. It is being squeezed from both sides: building on the sand behind the lagoon, and a sea creeping up into the freshwater lens the whole method depends on, which is a problem no amount of designation solves. Then south-west to Testour, founded by Andalusian Muslims expelled from Spain, where the minaret of the Great Mosque carries a clock whose hands run anticlockwise.
Dougga, then Le Kef
Dougga is the most complete Roman small town in North Africa — 65 hectares on an open hillside, listed in 1997, with the Capitol of AD 166 standing nearly whole and a Libyco-Punic mausoleum from the second century BC on the slope below it, two hundred years older than anything Roman around it. Give it three hours. Then up to Le Kef, a hill town under an Ottoman kasbah — built in 1601 and enlarged in the 1740s, on the footings of the Byzantine fort before it — with a fourth-century basilica below, a working zaouia and cold weather from November onwards.
Bulla Regia and Chemtou
North to Jendouba. At Bulla Regia the wealthy built an entire storey underground so the good rooms stayed cool in a plain that reaches the mid-forties in July, which is why the mosaic floors are still lying where they were laid rather than hanging in the Bardo. Chemtou, twenty minutes further, is the quarry that supplied giallo antico — the yellow marble Rome wanted for its columns — cut by convict labour under imperial management, with a museum that is better than the signposting to it. Read your own ministry's advice before driving this one: Chemtou sits inside the 30 km strip along the Algerian border that the British and several other foreign ministries advise against travelling into without good reason, and it is named in that advice explicitly. The site is open, staffed and visited, and the road out from Jendouba is ordinary — but a blanket travel policy can read a ministry line more literally than you do.
South by Sbeitla to Kairouan
Sufetula has three temples side by side on one forum instead of the usual single capitol, which is an arrangement with no clear parallel, plus a set of Byzantine churches and a great many olive presses. It is also where the exarch Gregory declared himself emperor in 646 and was killed by an Arab column the following year, which is roughly where Roman Africa stops. On to Kairouan for the evening and the Aghlabid basins at dusk.
Kairouan, then El Jem and Sfax
The Great Mosque admits non-Muslims to the courtyard in the morning and closes to them early in the afternoon, so go at eight. What stands is largely ninth-century Aghlabid, including a minaret that is probably the oldest surviving anywhere, and a courtyard paved and sloped to funnel every drop of rain into cisterns underneath it. Then east to El Jem, where a third-century amphitheatre for something like 35,000 people sits in a town that has never been remotely that size, and south to Sfax, whose walled medina is a commercial quarter rather than a visitor attraction and is the better for it.
Kerkennah
The ferry crosses in about an hour and a quarter. The islands are flat — nothing rises much above a dozen metres — and the sea around them stays shallow for kilometres, which is the whole basis of the charfia. Palm fronds are driven into the seabed in a long V that funnels fish carried on the ebb into chambers and finally a trap, the fish stay alive until the boat comes, and nothing touches the bottom. The sites are fixed, allocated under a customary tenure that passes down families, and the fronds come out in summer. UNESCO added the practice to the intangible heritage list in December 2020.
Back over, and south to Matmata
Morning ferry, then the road south through Gabès, the only oasis on the Mediterranean coast and also the site of the phosphate works that has been discharging phosphogypsum straight into the gulf since the early 1970s. The oasis has been shrinking the whole time and the inshore fishery with it, and the periodic gas releases that put schoolchildren in hospital are why Gabès protests more than most Tunisian cities do. You drive past all of that in twenty minutes. Up into the Matmata hills for the pit dwellings: a courtyard sunk into the ground with rooms cut horizontally off it, which is a cheap and effective answer to summer heat and a poor one to heavy rain — the floods of 1969 are what pushed most families up to the new village on the ridge.
The ksour of the Dahar
South to Tataouine and out to the villages. Chenini is a Berber settlement strung along a ridge with granary cells stacked up the rock beneath the old mosque; Douiret, on the next ridge, stands almost empty because the state moved the population down to a new village through the 1960s and 70s, where the school and the piped water were; a few families have since come back up to run guesthouses in the old houses. Ksar Ouled Soltane, east of the town, is a communal granary of four-storey ghorfas around two courtyards, restored and still the clearest surviving example of how a semi-nomadic population stored a harvest it was not there to guard.
West to Douz
The long transfer of the trip and the only one worth setting a whole day aside for: back up through Médenine and Gabès, then inland across the Nefzaoua to Kebili and Douz. Douz sits where the palm groves stop and the Grand Erg Oriental begins, and the difference is a single line you can stand on. The Thursday market is the regional one, camels included, and it is a livestock market that tourists attend rather than the other way round.
Across the Chott el Jerid
West to Kebili and out onto the causeway over the Chott el Jerid, a salt pan of roughly 5,000 square kilometres that carries shallow water for part of the winter and is bare crust the rest of the year. The road is tarmac the whole way; there is no reason to drive off it and the crust will not hold a car. Tozeur's palm grove on the far side is watered by a share-out credited to Ibn Chabbat in the thirteenth century, which divides the spring flow between plots through weirs cut to fixed proportions and still decides who gets what.
The mountain oases, then out
North-west along the Algerian frontier to Chebika, Tamerza and Mides — three villages that lived off springs in a rock desert until floods in 1969 destroyed them and the state rebuilt each one on new ground nearby, leaving the mud-brick originals standing empty beside their gorges. Mides sits on the rim of the deepest of them, and the gorge floor is the Algerian frontier — the whole loop runs inside the 10 km border strip that foreign ministries advise against, which is worth establishing with your insurer rather than with a soldier at a checkpoint. Back to Tozeur for the afternoon flight, or start the drive to Tunis, which is a full day on the road via Gafsa and Kairouan.
Good to know
EU, UK, US, Canadian, Australian and Japanese passport holders enter without a visa for up to 90 days; the passport is checked for validity at the desk and nothing else is required. There is no malaria anywhere in Tunisia and no prophylaxis is needed — a yellow fever certificate is demanded only from travellers arriving from a country with a risk of transmission, which does not include anywhere on this route. The restricted areas are specific rather than vague and worth reading properly, because this route touches three of them. Closed outright: Chaambi Mountains National Park, the declared military operations zones on Mount Salloum, Mount Sammama and Mount Mghila, and the militarised zone along the Libyan border south of Remada and Dhehiba. Advised against but open: a 30 km strip along the Algerian border in Kef and Jendouba governorates, inside which the British advice names Chemtou explicitly; the whole of Kasserine governorate including Sbeitla; and, further south, everything within 10 km of the Algerian border, which takes in Tamerza and Mides. The Libyan side is the tighter one, at 20 km north of Dhehiba plus the town of Ben Guerdane. None of Chemtou, Sbeitla or the mountain oases is shut, all three are visited daily and the roads to them are ordinary tarmac; the reason to know the wording is that standard travel insurance voids inside an advised-against area, so either buy cover that does not or accept that you are uninsured for those three days. On the ground the rule is to arrive on tarmac in daylight, not to go exploring west of Kasserine town, and not to take any track towards either border. Self-drive is genuinely realistic here — the A1 motorway runs most of the length of the coast, the P roads are surfaced and signed in Arabic and French, and fuel is cheap — but note that this route collects the car in Tunis and abandons it at Tozeur, which is a one-way hire: not every company permits a southern drop-off at all, the ones that do charge a repositioning fee that can run to three figures, and it needs agreeing in writing at the counter rather than discovering at the return. Do not drive between towns after dark, because unlit mopeds, carts and stationary lorries are the standing hazard, and expect police checkpoints where you hand over the passport and the hire agreement without comment. The dinar is a closed currency: you cannot buy it before you arrive, you may not take notes out, and you need the exchange receipts to convert anything back at the airport, so draw cash as you go rather than in one lump. Cards work in Tunis, Bizerte, Kairouan and Sfax and in very few places south of Gabès. Ichkeul is open all year but only worth the drive between roughly November and March, and in a dry winter the marshes may hold very little water — the park office at the foot of the hill will tell you honestly if you ask. The Sfax–Kerkennah ferry runs frequently and cheaply, but the vehicle queue in July and August can take hours; cross on foot and use a taxi on the island. The Tozeur–Tunis flight is a Tunisair Express service running a handful of times a week and thinning outside the April-to-October season, so confirm it before planning the last day around it. The south is at its best from about October to April; Tozeur and Douz routinely pass 45°C in July and August, when the sensible version of this route stops at Sfax. Ramadan moves about eleven days earlier each year and changes everything about opening hours and daytime eating without closing the archaeological sites, which keep normal times.
Shorter or longer?
Add four or five days from Matmata: the causeway to Djerba, inscribed by UNESCO in 2023 not for a town but for a settlement pattern of dispersed fortified homesteads each with its own cistern, then back through Médenine and out to the dune camp at Ksar Ghilane, which needs a 4x4 or a transfer and is the only genuinely remote night on any version of this trip.
Tunis, Carthage, Bizerte, Ichkeul, Ghar El Melh, Dougga, Le Kef and Kairouan, then back. Keeps the entire water argument and the best of the Roman sites, cuts the two long transfer days, the ferry and everything south of Sfax — and works with louages rather than a hired car.