🇹🇳 Tunisia
Sfax
Sfax is Tunisia's second-largest city (population 950,000) and the economic capital of southern Tunisia — a city whose character is defined by its exceptional Medina (one of the most intact and best-preserved medieval Islamic city centres in North Africa, with the finest surviving Arab urban fabric in Tunisia outside Kairouan) and by the remarkable prosperity generated from olive oil production (Sfax sits at the centre of Tunisia's olive belt — Tunisia is the world's leading olive oil exporter, and the region around Sfax has 15 million olive trees producing the world's largest single-region olive oil output; the Sfax olive oil culture (the olive tree has been cultivated in the Sfax region since the Phoenician period, over 2,500 years; the Sfaxian olive oil family cooperatives (the confréries de l'huile d'olive) have managed the same olive groves for generations, with some individual trees over 1,000 years old). Sfax's Medina is the largest traditional urban centre in Tunisia with a population still living in the historic walled city — approximately 30,000 people within the medieval walls; the Ksar (the double rampart of the Medina of Sfax, 9th century, rebuilt and reinforced multiple times to the 17th century) is the best-preserved set of Arab defensive walls in Tunisia; the Great Mosque of Sfax (849 AD — one of the oldest mosques in Tunisia, built in the Aghlabid period that also produced the Great Mosque of Kairouan; the minaret is the finest example of Aghlabid ecclesiastical architecture in southern Tunisia) and the Dar Jellouli Palace Museum (the finest traditional Sfaxian aristocratic town house, 17th century, with the original tile work, the carved plaster ceilings and the costumes of the traditional Sfaxian bourgeoisie). The Kerkennah Islands (25 km offshore — the flat, sandy, palm-covered archipelago accessible by ferry from Sfax; traditionally the most traditional fishing community in Tunisia, with the distinctive charfia fish trap technique, the octopus fishing and the horse-drawn calèche transport on the unpaved island roads) complete the Sfax experience.