Monastir

The headland has been settled since antiquity: the Phoenicians and then the Romans had a town here called Ruspina, which Julius Caesar used as a base during his African campaign in 46 BC. Its later identity was set in 796, when the Aghlabid governor Harthama ibn Ayan built a ribat on the shore — a fortified monastery whose garrison combined prayer with watching for Byzantine raiders. The Greek-derived name Monastir comes from that role. Chains of such forts ran along the Sahel coast, and Monastir's, repeatedly enlarged from the tenth century onwards, is the oldest of them.

Through the Middle Ages the town was a modest walled port living from fishing, olives and the trade of the Sahel, under Fatimid, Zirid, Hafsid and later Ottoman authority. Its cemetery beside the ribat, Sidi el Mezri, grew large, partly because burial next to a ribat was held to be blessed.

The twentieth century transformed it. Habib Bourguiba was born in Monastir in 1903, and after he led Tunisia to independence in 1956 and became its first president, his home town was rebuilt on a scale far beyond its size: avenues, public buildings, a university, an airport opened in the 1960s, and finally the mausoleum where he was buried in 2000, after years of house arrest here following his deposition in 1987. Tourism arrived at the same time, filling the Skanes shore with hotels, and the town has lived since from that industry, textiles and the sea.

Monastir's identity is bound up with Bourguiba. The mausoleum, the avenue leading to it and the museum of his personal effects are visited by Tunisians as much as by foreigners, and opinions about him — the moderniser of the Personal Status Code, the autocrat who ruled for three decades — are argued over here with particular feeling. The Sahel's reputation as the country's political and business heartland begins in towns like this one.

Alongside that is an older religious culture: the ribat as a place of devotion, the saints' tombs scattered through the cemetery, and the pilgrimage traditions attached to them. The town is more relaxed than the interior, used to foreign visitors since the 1960s, and dress and daily manners on the seafront reflect that, though the medina and the residential quarters keep to Tunisian norms.

Sport and the sea shape leisure. Football is followed passionately, with the Sahel derbies against Sousse a fixture of local life, and the marina supports sailing and fishing. Summer evenings are spent walking the corniche, and family life dominates the weekends, with picnics and beach outings. The ribat's photogenic walls have served as a film location, most famously for scenes in Monty Python's Life of Brian, a connection older visitors still mention.

Around 100,000 people live in Monastir, and the wider governorate is one of the most densely populated and industrialised parts of Tunisia. Textiles and clothing are the backbone — the Monastir–Ksar Hellal belt supplies European brands — alongside tourism, fishing, olive growing and the services around a large university and one of the country's main teaching hospitals. Students give the town a younger feel outside the summer.

Life divides between the seasons. In summer the population swells with holiday flats, returning emigrants from France and Italy, and hotel staff drawn from the surrounding towns; in winter the hotel strip empties and the town returns to its markets, schools and offices. The medina is more shop than home, while most residents live in the low apartment blocks and villas spreading inland.

The rhythm is Mediterranean: an early start, a long lunch and a quiet afternoon in the heat, then a crowded evening of cafés and promenading. The strains are those felt across Tunisia — inflation, unemployment among graduates, and emigration, legal and otherwise — cushioned here by an economy with more legs than most towns can call on.

Monastir eats from the sea. Sardines, mullet, bream, sea bass and octopus come off the boats at the fishing port, and the standard treatment is charcoal grilling with lemon, olive oil and a dish of harissa, the chilli and garlic paste that accompanies almost everything in Tunisia. Fish couscous, the semolina steamed over the stock of the catch, is the Sunday and celebration dish of the Sahel, and slatit mechouia — charred peppers and tomatoes chopped with oil, capers and tuna — begins many meals.

Brik, a thin sheet of pastry folded around egg, tuna, capers and parsley and deep-fried, is eaten as a starter; ojja poaches eggs in a spiced tomato and pepper sauce, often with merguez sausage or prawns. Lablabi, chickpeas in garlicky broth ladled over torn bread, is a winter breakfast, and kaftaji fries vegetables and egg together into a chopped plateful. Olive oil from the Sahel groves is used generously and sold in the market by the litre.

Sweets lean on semolina, almonds and dates: makroudh from Kairouan, baklava-like pastries, and bambalouni, a ring doughnut fried at street stalls and dusted with sugar, eaten along the seafront. The drinks are mint tea with pine nuts and strong coffee; local wine and beer are served in hotels and marina bars rather than in the town's ordinary cafés.