Tunis

Tunis is far older than its fame suggests: a Libyan and then Punic town called Tunes stood on the ridge above the lagoon while Carthage, a few kilometres away on the coast, ran the western Mediterranean. It was destroyed alongside Carthage in 146 BC and rebuilt under Rome as a modest provincial town. Its rise came after the Arab conquest at the end of the 7th century, when the new rulers built the Zitouna Mosque and, distrusting the exposed coast, made the inland site their base; the ships of the new fleet were built at the lagoon.

Under the Hafsid dynasty, from the 13th century, Tunis became a capital in its own right. The medina filled with souks organised by trade, madrasas, hammams and merchants' funduqs, and the city drew scholars, among them Ibn Khaldun, who was born here in 1332. Andalusi Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain settled in the city and the towns around it. The Ottomans took Tunis in 1574 after decades of struggle with Spain, and under the Husainid beys, who ruled from 1705, it grew into a cosmopolitan port with Italian, Maltese and Jewish quarters.

The French protectorate of 1881 changed the shape of the city rather than its heart: engineers drained part of the lagoon, cut a ship canal to La Goulette and laid a European town of boulevards, apartment blocks and cafés on the reclaimed ground beside the medina. Independence came in 1956, and Tunis became the capital of the new republic and, from 1979 to 1990, the seat of the Arab League. In January 2011 crowds on Avenue Habib Bourguiba brought down the government, the first act of the Arab Spring, and the city has remained the centre of national politics through the contested changes since 2021.

The capital sets the country's tone. Tunisian Arabic, or Derja, is the language of the street, French runs through offices, universities and advertising, and the two mix freely in the same sentence. Café life is the main social institution, from the tiled coffee houses of the medina to the terraces of La Marsa, and it is where politics, football and family news are worked over at length across a short black coffee or a mint tea with pine nuts.

Music is the medina's strongest inheritance. The Rachidia institute, founded in 1934, was set up to preserve malouf, the Andalusian-rooted classical music brought by refugees from Spain, and its repertoire still anchors concerts and wedding orchestras. The palace at Sidi Bou Said built by Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger now holds a centre devoted to Arab and Mediterranean music. Cinema matters too: the Carthage Film Festival, founded in 1966, made the city a meeting point for African and Arab film-makers.

Craft guilds shaped the old city and some survive, above all the chechia makers, whose red felt caps are shaped, dyed and brushed in a souk of their own. Manners are courteous and indirect: greetings are unhurried, invitations are pressed more than once, and hospitality is taken seriously. Tunis is more secular in daily habit than much of the region, a legacy of the reforms of the 1950s, but Ramadan reshapes the whole rhythm of the city, and Friday prayers empty the souks for an hour around midday.

Greater Tunis, which takes in the city and the governorates of Ariana, Ben Arous and Manouba, has about 2.7 million inhabitants — close to a quarter of the country's population; the municipality itself holds a much smaller share. The medina holds only a fraction of them; most live in the apartment districts of El Menzah, El Manar and Bardo, the coastal suburbs along the TGM, or the fast-grown, less serviced neighbourhoods on the southern and western edges.

The city concentrates government, banks, insurance, universities, hospitals, broadcasting and most of the country's professional employment, with industrial zones in Ben Arous and Megrine and a new business district built on reclaimed land beside the lagoon. Wages are higher here than elsewhere in Tunisia and so are rents, and the gap between the seaside northern suburbs and the crowded southern ones is wide.

The day starts early — offices and schools open soon after eight, and the working day shortens in summer — pauses in the afternoon heat, and comes alive again in the evening on the corniche and in the cafés. The pressures are the national ones felt sharply in the capital: inflation, the occasional shortage of subsidised goods such as flour, sugar or bottled water, graduate unemployment, the emigration of doctors and engineers, and long commutes on crowded roads and trains.

Tunis eats spicier food than most of the Maghreb, and harissa, the pounded chilli paste, is on nearly every table. The city's own street staple is lablabi, a bowl of chickpeas in garlicky cumin broth poured over torn stale bread and topped with olive oil, harissa, capers, tuna and a soft egg, eaten above all in winter. Kaftaji is its fried cousin: peppers, pumpkin, courgette and onion cooked in oil, chopped together with egg and served in a bowl with bread.

Brik, a thin sheet of malsouka pastry folded around egg, tuna, capers and parsley and deep-fried, is the classic starter, judged by whether the yolk survives the first bite. La Goulette is the place for fish — grilled sea bream and mullet, and the complet poisson that comes with salad, rice and fried peppers — and for fricassé, a small fried roll stuffed with tuna, potato, olives and harissa. Couscous appears on Fridays, with lamb, fish or vegetables, and ojja, eggs cooked into a spiced tomato and pepper sauce with merguez, is a cheap late meal.

Sweets are a serious business in the capital: baklawa in lozenges, samsa triangles of almond and filo, zlabia coiled and syruped during Ramadan, and bambalouni, a sugared doughnut fried to order and sold hot at Sidi Bou Said. Coffee is short and strong, often scented with orange-blossom water; mint tea comes with pine nuts or almonds; and Tunisian wine, boukha, a fig spirit, and citronnade are the drinks of a Sunday lunch by the sea.