Tunis layers three thousand years into one bay: Punic tophets and Roman mosaics at Carthage, a Hafsid medina of madrasas and mausoleums, and the colonnaded avenues where Bourguiba declared a republic in 1957. Each era is still walkable.
Housed in a 15th-century Hafsid palace rebuilt by the Husainid beys, the Bardo holds the world's largest Roman mosaic collection — the Virgil portrait, Ulysses and the Sirens, and Punic stelae from Carthage. Open Tue–Sun 09:30–16:30, closed Monday.
The two Punic harbours — a rectangular commercial basin and the circular military port that berthed 220 warships — still hold water beside the Tophet, the walled sanctuary of urns and stelae excavated from 1921. Admission covers all Carthage sites.
Byrsa is where Queen Elissa's ox-hide legend places Carthage's founding around 814 BC. Roman engineers sheared the summit for a forum, but a block of 3rd-century BC Punic houses with cisterns and stairways survives beneath the cathedral terrace.
The largest Roman thermae outside Italy, finished under Antoninus Pius in AD 162. Only the service basement survives, but a single re-erected column stands 15 m tall, giving the scale of a frigidarium that once rose 30 m above the shoreline.
An 18th-century patrician palace in the Bab Menara quarter, its marble courtyard and painted ceilings staged with wax tableaux of Tunisois family life under the beys: the bride's chamber, the man's salon, the trousseau room. Closed Mondays.
The square before the Prime Ministry was the Hafsid citadel, then the French Résidence. In January 2011 it filled with the Kasbah sit-ins that brought down the interim government, and the 1957 republic was proclaimed from these ministries.
Ali Pasha II built this domed necropolis in the 1770s for the Husainid dynasty that ruled Tunisia until 1957. Beys lie under marble headstones carved with turbans; princesses under floral finials. Italianate stucco marks the 18th-century European turn.
The French laid this colonnaded boulevard on drained lake mud in the 1880s. Bourguiba's equestrian statue returned in 2016 to the spot Ben Ali replaced with a clock tower; the tower at Place du 14-Janvier-2011 now names the revolution's date.
Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger's 1912 palace anchors the blue-and-white village that a 1915 decree froze architecturally. Inside: his Arab-music research rooms and instrument collection, the basis of Tunisia's 1932 Cairo Congress delegation.
The Ottoman-Spanish fort of 1535 guarded the channel to the Lake of Tunis and later held Bourguiba's political prisoners. The surrounding port quarter was Tunisia's Sicilian and Jewish neighbourhood until the 1960s — its bakeries still show it.
Founded around 1609 by Muslims expelled from Spain, Testour's minaret carries a clock whose hands run anticlockwise and a Star of David in its brickwork. Street grids and tiled roofs follow Aragonese, not Maghrebi, plans. 76 km west of Tunis.
Tunis held 100,000 Jews before 1948; the Hara around rue Zarkoun was cleared in the 1930s–60s. The 1938 Grande Synagogue on avenue de la Liberté, in Art Deco concrete, serves the remaining community of roughly 1,000.