Culture & heritage: 3,000 years at the centre of the Mediterranean

For five centuries Tunisia — then called Africa Proconsularis — fed Rome. Two-thirds of the wheat consumed in the imperial capital came from Tunisian fields. The wealth this generated built some of the most spectacular Roman cities outside Italy, and most of them are still standing today, often eerily empty of tourists. El Jem, in the central plains, holds the third-largest amphitheatre in the Roman world — a 35,000-seat colosseum that dwarfs the one in Rome's outer suburbs and rivals the original itself. Dougga, set on a hilltop two hours from Tunis, is widely considered the best-preserved Roman small town anywhere in North Africa: a complete Capitoline temple, a theatre cut into the slope, a forum, baths, brothels, and the cobbled lanes still wide enough for a chariot. Sbeitla preserves three temples in a row — a configuration almost unique in the Roman world. Bulla Regia is famous for its underground villas, where wealthy Romans lived a storey beneath ground level to escape the summer heat, with mosaic floors of breathtaking quality still in place. The Bardo Museum in Tunis holds the world's finest collection of Roman mosaics — over 4 hectares of floors and walls lifted from villas across the country, including Virgil being inspired by his muses, the only known portrait of the poet from antiquity.

When the Arabs founded their cities they invented an urban form that defined the Mediterranean south for a millennium: the medina. A walled old town of narrow shaded lanes, courtyard houses turned inward against the heat, mosques marking each quarter, a covered souk at the centre with each trade given its own street — perfumers, copper-beaters, silk weavers, bookbinders, sandal-makers — and gates that closed at sunset. Four Tunisian medinas are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list: Tunis, Sousse, Sfax and Kairouan. The Tunis medina alone has 700 listed monuments — palaces, madrasas, mausoleums, fountains, hammams — packed into 280 hectares. What makes it remarkable is not preservation but continuity: these are living neighbourhoods, not museum quarters. Butchers, perfumers, copper-beaters and sandal-makers still work in the same streets their grandfathers worked. The Tunis souk has been the city's commercial heart since 698 AD. Children walk to school past 13th-century portals. Spend an afternoon getting lost in one. Have mint tea on a rooftop overlooking the Zaytuna Mosque. Watch a craftsman engrave a brass tray the same way it has been done for 800 years. This is the single best thing you can do in Tunisia.

Long before Phoenicians, Romans or Arabs, this land belonged to the Amazigh — the Berbers, North Africa's indigenous people. Their language, traditions and silver jewellery are still alive in the south, in the troglodyte villages of Matmata where families have lived in pit-houses carved into the earth for over a thousand years (and where George Lucas filmed Luke Skywalker's home), in the cliff-top granaries of Chenini and Douiret, and on the island of Djerba, whose calm has sheltered minorities for two and a half millennia. Djerba is also home to one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world. The El Ghriba synagogue, on the southern edge of the island, claims a foundation date of 586 BC — a stone from the destroyed First Temple of Solomon is said to be built into its walls. Every spring, on the festival of Lag BaOmer, Jews from Tunisia, France, Israel and beyond travel here for one of the most important pilgrimages in North African Judaism. Until the mid-twentieth century Tunisia had over 100,000 Jewish citizens; the community is small today but active, and the synagogues of Tunis, Sousse and Djerba still hold services. Tunisia was also home to powerful Christian centres in late antiquity. Saint Augustine, Saint Cyprian and Tertullian — three of the founding figures of Western Christian theology — were all North African, and the early church councils of Carthage shaped Christianity itself. The pluralism of modern Tunisia is not a recent project. It is a 3,000-year inheritance.

Tunisian craft traditions are alive in a way that's rare elsewhere in the Mediterranean — you can still buy directly from the family that has made the object for six generations. Look for: hand-knotted carpets and flatwoven mergoum kilims from Kairouan (graded by knot density and stamped by the national craft office); the green and yellow ceramics of Nabeul; the painted, signed pottery of Sejnane, made by Berber women with techniques unchanged since the Neolithic and inscribed by UNESCO in 2018; engraved copper trays and lanterns from Tunis; olive-wood kitchenware from the Sahel; chunky silver Berber jewellery from the south; and the southern leather slippers called balgha. For the kitchen, take home harissa in a tube, a tin of olive oil from a single estate (Olivko, Domaine Triki, Mahjoub), saffron from local cooperatives, and orange-blossom or rose water distilled in Nabeul each spring. A jar of artisanal harissa weighs nothing and will outclass anything you can buy at home. In the souks, prices are negotiable — half the asking price is a fair starting point, and a smile, a glass of mint tea, and patience get you further than aggressive haggling.

Tunisia became independent from France in 1956 under Habib Bourguiba, a French-trained lawyer with a radical agenda. Within a decade he had abolished polygamy, granted women the vote and the right to divorce, made primary schooling compulsory and free for both sexes, and built one of the most developed education systems in the Arab world. Tunisian women today have legal rights — to work, to inherit, to marry whom they choose, to lead a government — that are still contested in much of the region. In December 2010, a young fruit seller in the inland town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in protest at police harassment. Within weeks, mass demonstrations forced the country's authoritarian president into exile. The Tunisian Revolution lit the fuse for the Arab Spring across the entire Middle East. Of all the countries that rose, Tunisia is the only one that produced a working democracy: a new constitution in 2014, peaceful transfers of power, an active press, and a quartet of civil-society organisations (the trade union, the employers' federation, the human rights league and the lawyers' order) who won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for keeping the transition on track. This is the country you arrive in: ancient, layered, sometimes turbulent, deeply hospitable, intellectually serious, and quietly proud of being unlike anywhere else.