Tripod Travel’s 4K production captures the full sweep of what makes a Tunis walking tour so rewarding: the compressed labyrinth of the UNESCO-listed medina gives way to the French Ville Nouvelle’s broad avenues, and a short TGM train ride delivers you to the whitewashed clifftop village of Sidi Bou Said — three utterly different urban landscapes within a single extraordinary city. Tunis compresses Carthaginian, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French colonial layers into a walking experience that has few equals on the Mediterranean coast.
About This Walking Tour
Tripod Travel shoots in cinematic 4K, and the format pays dividends in Tunis’s visually dense medina, where geometric tile patterns, mint-green doorways, and shafts of light through souk awnings reward high-resolution treatment. The tour enters the medina through Bab el Bahr (Porte de France) — the historic gateway connecting the French colonial city to the Arab old town — and threads through the main souqs: the Souk des Chéchias (red felt hat makers), the Souk du Cuivre, the Souk des Libraires, and the perfume souk, each trading a specific craft in a centuries-old commercial geography. The Zitouna Mosque, the spiritual and architectural centrepiece of the medina, sits at the junction of the major souq arteries. From there, Tripod Travel transitions to Sidi Bou Said, capturing the blue-and-white clifftop village’s bougainvillea-laden lanes and rooftop cafés with the same steady, unhurried eye. The 4K footage makes this one of the most visually accomplished Tunis tours on YouTube, and an excellent tool for planning your own itinerary.
Highlights of Tunis
The Medina of Tunis is the oldest continuously inhabited part of the city, a dense web of covered souqs, mosques, madrasas, and residential quarters that has changed little in its essential structure since the Arab conquest of the 7th century. The Zitouna Mosque (Great Mosque of the Olive Tree) anchors the medina’s core and is the oldest mosque in Tunisia, its colonnaded courtyard drawing on columns salvaged from ancient Carthage. The Bardo National Museum, housed in a former Ottoman palace on the city’s western edge, holds the world’s largest collection of Roman mosaics — including the renowned Virgil mosaic from the 3rd century CE. Sidi Bou Said, perched on a clifftop above the Gulf of Tunis, is one of the Mediterranean’s most photographed villages: its strictly enforced blue-and-white colour palette, bougainvillea-draped walls, and terrace cafés make it an obvious afternoon extension to the medina walk. The Ville Nouvelle, Tunis’s French colonial quarter, adds a further layer with its wide Haussmann-style avenues and ornate early 20th-century civic architecture.
A Brief History of Tunis
The city of Tunis was founded in the 7th century CE following the Arab conquest of North Africa, though the wider region had been settled for millennia — ancient Carthage, the great Phoenician trading city, occupied the cape just north of modern Tunis before its destruction by Rome in 146 BCE. The medina grew under successive Islamic dynasties — Aghlabids, Fatimids, Hafsids — into one of the Arab world’s most sophisticated urban centres, its merchant souqs feeding a network of trade stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to the Ottoman heartland. Ottoman rule from the 16th century added beylical palaces and hammams to the medina fabric. French protectorate status from 1881 brought the Ville Nouvelle alongside the existing Arab city, creating the dual-city structure that still defines Tunis today. Sidi Bou Said’s distinctive blue-and-white aesthetic was formalised by the resident artist Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger, who purchased properties in the village from 1912 and promoted a uniform colour scheme that became mandatory by ordinance — the Mediterranean’s most successfully maintained design code.
Practical Tips
Spring (March–May) and autumn (September–October) offer the most comfortable walking temperatures in Tunis. August heat makes prolonged medina walking uncomfortable. Tunis-Carthage International Airport is close to the city centre; the Metro Léger light rail reaches Bab el Bahr (medina entrance) directly. The TGM train from Tunis Marine station reaches Sidi Bou Said in about 30 minutes — run it as an afternoon extension. Dress modestly for the medina and mosque areas. The souqs are best in the morning when they are most animated; the Bardo Museum warrants a separate half-day and is best reached by taxi.
Watch & Explore More
Explore more North African medinas with our Fes medina and tanneries walking tour or our Marrakech Jemaa el-Fna and souks tour. For new walking tour destinations every week, subscribe to @walkingtoursvideoscom on YouTube.