Tabarka

The Phoenicians traded from this shore, and the Roman town of Thabraca grew on the site as the port that shipped the yellow marble quarried at Chemtou and the grain of the Medjerda valley down the coast to Rome. It became an early Christian centre and a bishopric, and the tombs in its Christian cemeteries were covered with mosaics, some of them showing church buildings. The offshore island guarded the anchorage.

In 1540 the island passed to the Genoese: the Lomellini family were granted it, by one account as part of the ransom for the corsair Dragut, and held it for two centuries as a base for the red coral fishery, garrisoning the fort that still crowns the rock. Their settlers came from Pegli, near Genoa. As the coral beds were exhausted, groups left in 1738 to found Carloforte on the island of San Pietro off Sardinia and to settle nearby Calasetta, and others went to New Tabarca in Spain, which still carries the name; the fortress itself surrendered to the Bey of Tunis in 1741.

Under the French protectorate the town became the outlet for the cork and timber of the Kroumirie, cut in the forests around Aïn Draham and shipped from a rebuilt harbour. Tourism arrived late, in the 1960s and 1970s, with the beach hotels, the airport built inland in 1992, the golf course laid out in the 1990s between the town and the airport, and a jazz festival that gave the town a name beyond Tunisia. It has stayed a small place, its fortunes tied to fishing, forestry and a short summer season.

Tabarka sits at the meeting of two worlds: a fishing and coral town facing the sea, and the mountain country of the Kroumirie behind it, whose villages keep their own customs of forest work, herding and hospitality. The border with Algeria is close enough that families, dialects and trade cross it, and Algerian visitors have long been part of the town's summer.

Coral gives the place much of its identity. The reefs offshore produce the red coral that was fished commercially for centuries, and local workshops still cut and set it, though the fishery is now tightly regulated. Diving has grown out of the same waters, with caves, drop-offs and the rock formations off the headland drawing divers from spring to autumn.

The jazz festival, held in July, begun in 1973 and revived in 1997, made Tabarka known in Tunisia as a music town, and the summer brings concerts, open-air evenings and a crowded seafront. Outside those weeks life is quiet and local, paced by the fishing fleet, the weekly market and the café terraces on the main street. Manners are Maghrebi and unhurried: long greetings, several rounds of tea or coffee, and a strong sense that guests are the household's responsibility.

The municipality counted close to 20,000 people at the 2014 census, a small place even by the standards of the thinly populated northwest. Work divides between fishing, forestry, farming in the coastal plain, the seasonal hotels and public service jobs in a governorate, Jendouba, that has some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in Tunisia. Many young people leave for Tunis or abroad.

The day begins early at the harbour, where the catch is landed and sold, and slows through the afternoon before the evening promenade along the seafront and the main avenue. The market is the social centre as much as the commercial one. In summer the population multiplies and the town works long hours; from November the hotels empty, the rain sets in, and the forest economy of cork, charcoal and timber takes over inland.

The persistent concerns are the ones the whole region shares: unemployment, irregular migration by sea, the state of the roads into the hills, and years of drought that cut the wheat harvest in the valley. Investment has been promised repeatedly for the airport and the port, and has arrived slowly.

Fish dominates the table. The harbour lands sea bream, sea bass, sardines, red mullet, octopus and prawns, and the standard meal is a whole fish grilled over charcoal with olive oil, lemon and slata mechouia, the salad of grilled peppers, tomatoes and garlic pounded with olive oil that appears on every table in Tunisia. Complète, a plate of fried squid and prawns with salad, is common in the port restaurants, and the north coast cooks fish in soups and in couscous, a combination particular to this seaboard.

The forests inland supply what the sea does not. Cork-oak country gives honey, chestnuts, wild mushrooms sold in the market after autumn rain, and game in the hunting season, and the farms of the Medjerda valley send wheat, olive oil, sheep and goat cheese. Harissa, the chilli paste, and brik, a thin pastry parcel with egg and tuna fried until crisp, are eaten here as everywhere in the country.

Drinking follows the Tunisian pattern: coffee in the morning, mint tea with pine nuts or almonds in the afternoon, and fresh juice in summer. Tunisian wine from the vineyards around Tunis and the local beer are sold in hotels and licensed restaurants, and thibarine, a sweet herbal liqueur made with dates, is a Tunisian speciality.