Hammamet

Hammamet grew up around a Roman town called Pupput, which stood on the coast just south of the modern centre and prospered from farming and the road along the Cap Bon shore; its cemeteries and mosaic floors are still being excavated. The Arabic name means 'the baths', and after the Arab conquest a small walled settlement took shape beside the sea. Walls went up around the town in the 13th century and the medina took its present shape in the 15th, with the kasbah rebuilt and enlarged by successive rulers who used this stretch of coast to watch for raiders.

For centuries it was a modest place of fishermen, gardeners and citrus growers, overshadowed by Nabeul and by Tunis. Its second life began between the wars, when foreign residents discovered it: Georges Sebastian built a white villa, Dar Sébastian, in a garden above the gulf, and it became the best-known house on this stretch of coast. Writers, painters and film people followed, and the villa came to stand for the town's reputation as a retreat.

After independence the villa passed to the state and became the International Cultural Centre, whose open-air theatre still holds the summer festival. Tunisia's tourism drive from the 1960s turned the coast north and south of the medina into a hotel strip, kept low and screened by gardens under building rules that limited height. The Yasmine Hammamet resort district, built from the late 1990s around a new marina, extended the town southwards. Tourist numbers fell after 2011 and again after 2015, recovered later in the decade, and the town remains one of the mainstays of Tunisian tourism.

Hammamet has two rhythms. In summer it belongs to visitors, Tunisian and foreign: the corniche fills after dark, the cafés run late, and music carries from the marina. Out of season it returns to being a farming and fishing town where everyone knows the market traders and the same men play cards in the same cafés each afternoon.

Its cultural reputation rests on the villa Georges Sebastian built and on the festival that grew around it. Since the 1960s the open-air theatre in its gardens has staged Tunisian and international theatre, dance and music through July and August, and the centre also runs workshops and exhibitions. The town's older fame as a haunt of artists and writers between the wars is still a point of local pride.

Jasmine is the town's emblem. Sprigs are bound into small white posies, called machmoum, sold at street corners on summer evenings and worn behind the ear or tucked into a shirt, a habit shared with the rest of the Cap Bon coast. The surrounding countryside supplies it, along with orange blossom distilled in spring. Craft traditions are close at hand rather than in the town itself: Nabeul's potters and the region's weavers supply many of the shops inside the medina walls. Manners are the coastal Tunisian norm — unhurried greetings, insistent hospitality and bargaining conducted with good humour.

Reported figures for the town's population vary widely, from about 100,000 upwards, and the number of people here multiplies in July and August. Most residents live inland from the coast road in Hammamet Sud and the streets behind the market rather than in the medina, which has partly emptied of families as shops, guesthouses and holiday homes have taken over its houses.

Tourism is the main employer: hotels, restaurants, excursion agencies, taxis and the marina businesses, with a large seasonal workforce that arrives from other governorates for the summer. Around it, Cap Bon farming continues — citrus, peppers, tomatoes and vines — along with fishing from the small harbour and building work that has spread new apartment blocks across the town's edges. Nabeul, the governorate capital, provides the administration, hospitals and pottery workshops.

The working day starts early and pauses through the hot afternoon; shops reopen towards evening and stay open late in summer. Life is lived outdoors from May to October, on the beach in the daytime and along the corniche at night. The pressures are the seasonal ones: work that disappears in winter, dependence on bookings made abroad, pressure on water supply in high summer, and coastal erosion that has narrowed parts of the beach.

The kitchen here is the Cap Bon one: heavy on the peninsula's peppers, tomatoes and citrus, with fish from the harbour. Grilled sea bream, sea bass and mullet are the standard restaurant order, often with slata mechouia, a salad of charred peppers and tomatoes pounded with garlic, olive oil, tuna and egg. Seafood couscous, with fish or octopus and a broth reddened by harissa, appears on Fridays and at family meals.

Harissa itself comes from just up the road: Nabeul is the centre of Tunisian chilli growing, and the paste is pounded with garlic, caraway and coriander. It goes into ojja, eggs cooked in spiced tomato and pepper sauce with merguez or shrimp, and into kamounia and other stews. Brik, the fried pastry parcel of egg and tuna, is eaten as a starter everywhere, and street stalls sell fricassé rolls and kaftaji.

Cap Bon is also fruit country, and the spring orange harvest supplies both the market and the stills that make orange-blossom water, used in pastries and stirred into coffee. Local wines from the peninsula's vineyards, including dry muscat from Kelibia, are served in licensed restaurants, and bambalouni, the hot sugared doughnut, and almond samsa are the sweets sold along the seafront.