Sousse

The Phoenicians founded Hadrumetum here, a colony older than Carthage, and it became one of the leading ports of the Carthaginian world, serving the olive and grain country behind it. It sided with Rome late in the Punic Wars and was rewarded with free-city status, growing rich enough under the empire to floor its houses with the mosaics now displayed in the kasbah. Christianity took hold early, and extensive Roman and Byzantine catacombs run under the modern city. Vandals and Byzantines followed, each renaming the town.

The Arab conquest of the 7th century brought the name Susa and a new role as a frontier port. The Aghlabid emirs of the 9th century made it a base for the invasion of Sicily in 827 and fortified it heavily: the ribat, the Great Mosque and the walls around the medina all date from those decades, and they survive almost intact. The city kept its trade through Fatimid, Hafsid and Ottoman rule, exporting olive oil from the Sahel.

Sousse was heavily bombed during the Second World War, suffering dozens of raids between December 1942 and May 1943, but the medina came through. After independence the Sahel supplied much of the country's political class, and Sousse expanded rapidly with a university, textile factories and the tourism drive that built the hotel strip and, from the late 1970s, the marina resort of Port El Kantaoui. The medina was inscribed by UNESCO in 1988. Visitor numbers fell after the 2011 revolution and again after an attack on a beach at Port El Kantaoui in 2015, before recovering later in the decade.

Sousse is the capital of the Sahel, the coastal strip whose families have long held a disproportionate share of the country's political and business life, and there is a certain confidence in how the city carries itself. It is also a university town, which gives the centre a young, secular-leaning street life quite different from the inland towns an hour away.

The summer carnival, held on 24 July in the hottest weeks of the year, is the city's own festival: floats, costumes and music along the seafront, with groups invited from abroad. Around it the Sahel keeps a dense calendar of weddings, religious festivals and beach concerts through July and August, and the whole coast celebrates the olive year at the other end of the calendar.

Football is a serious matter here, and the city's club is one of the most successful in Tunisian and African competition; match days colour the cafés of the whole governorate. Everyday manners follow the coastal Tunisian pattern — long greetings, coffee pressed on visitors, bargaining conducted with humour — and the mix of a conservative old city with a resort strip a few kilometres away is handled by keeping the two worlds fairly separate.

About 270,000 people live in the city, with several hundred thousand more in the surrounding governorate, one of the most densely settled parts of the country. Relatively few live in the medina; the population is spread through Sousse Riadh, Khezama, Sahloul and the towns that have merged with the city along the coast and the road to Monastir.

The economy rests on four things — tourism along the coast, the textile and clothing factories that employ tens of thousands across the Sahel, the port and olive-oil trade, and the university and hospitals, including the large medical complex at Sahloul. Work in tourism is seasonal and vulnerable to events far away, as the years after 2011 and 2015 showed, while the factories depend on European orders.

Days start early, pause in the afternoon heat and revive in the evening on the promenade; Friday and Sunday belong to family meals and the beach in season. The pressures are inflation, graduate unemployment, the cost of housing near the coast and pressure on water in summer, and many young people from the city look for work in Tunis or abroad.

The Sahel eats fish and olive oil. Grilled sea bream, bass, sardines and octopus come from the fishing quay, usually served with slata mechouia, the salad of charred peppers and tomatoes pounded with garlic, oil and tuna, and harissa on the side. Seafood couscous, the semolina steamed over a spiced fish broth, is a Friday and family dish, and the region's olive oil is poured over almost everything.

Street and market food is cheap and good: lablabi, a chickpea soup poured over torn bread with egg, capers and harissa; kaftaji, fried peppers and pumpkin chopped with egg; fricassé rolls stuffed with tuna and olives; and brik, the fried pastry parcel of egg and tuna eaten as a starter. Ojja, eggs set in a spiced tomato and pepper sauce with merguez, is a standard late meal.

Sweets tie the city to its hinterland. Kairouan's makroudh, diamond-shaped semolina pastries filled with date paste and soaked in honey, are sold everywhere here, alongside baklawa, almond samsa and, in the summer, bambalouni fried and sugared on the promenade. Coffee is short and strong, mint tea comes with pine nuts, and Tunisian wine is served in hotels and licensed restaurants rather than cafés.