Carthage & Tunis: From Hannibal to the Medina
A curated tour of Carthage and Tunis — two UNESCO World Heritage Sites separated by just 15 km, spanning over 2,800 years of history from Phoenician Carthage and Roman Africa to medieval Islamic Tunis, all within one of the Mediterranean's most extraordinary layered landscapes.
Trip Stops
- 1
The world's greatest collection of Roman mosaics under one roof — housed in a magnificent 15th-century Hafsid palace, it is the second-largest museum in Africa after Cairo. Its mosaic galleries cover every room of the former palace, with masterpieces of extraordinary scale and colour from Carthage, Dougga, Sousse, and across Roman Africa. The famous Virgil Mosaic, showing the poet flanked by the Muses, is its crown jewel.
📍 Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia
- 2
One of the finest surviving medieval Arab cities in the world — a UNESCO World Heritage labyrinth of over 700 monuments including mosques, madrasas, palaces, and covered souks, built around the 9th-century Zitouna Mosque after Roman Carthage was destroyed in 698 AD. Its souks are organized by craft — perfumers, silk weavers, bookbinders, chechia hat-makers — in a system unchanged since the Hafsid dynasty. Get lost in it deliberately.
📍 Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia
- 3
The most haunting and debated monument in Carthage — a sacred Punic precinct dedicated to the gods Tanit and Baal Hammon, containing over 20,000 burial urns of infants dating from the city's founding around 800 BC. Whether this was a cemetery for naturally deceased children or a site of ritual sacrifice remains one of archaeology's great unresolved controversies. Rows of carved stone stelae bearing the symbol of Tanit still stand where they were placed 2,500 years ago.
📍 Carthage, Tunis, Tunisia
- 4
The twin harbours that made Carthage the greatest maritime power in the ancient Mediterranean — a rectangular commercial port and a circular military port (cothon) that once sheltered 220 warships in individual docking sheds, each capable of holding an entire quinquereme under cover. In 146 BC the Romans burned these levees to begin the final destruction of the city. A small museum on the admiralty island displays scale models reconstructing the ancient port's astonishing scale.
📍 Carthage, Tunis, Tunisia
- 5
The citadel-hill at the heart of ancient Carthage — the last stronghold to fall to Rome in 146 BC after a six-day street-by-street battle ending in fire — now bearing the Carthage National Museum (founded 1875) atop the ruins of a 19th-century cathedral. The exposed Punic quarter on its slopes shows a rare grid of 2nd-century BC houses preserved beneath the later Roman city. The panoramic view over the entire site, the bay, and the ports is the finest in Carthage.
📍 Carthage, Tunis, Tunisia
- 6
Perched atop Byrsa Hill, this museum — founded in 1875 as the first museum on the site — holds Punic masks, sarcophagi, amulets, and the famous 3rd-century BC marble sarcophagus of a priest and priestess with traces of original paint still visible. Its collection of Tophet stelae inscribed with the symbol of Tanit, and its Roman mosaics including the 'Lady of Carthage', make it an essential complement to the outdoor ruins.
📍 Carthage, Tunis, Tunisia
- 7
A semi-circular Roman theatre built in the 2nd century AD on a hillside above the sea — substantially reconstructed but still evocative, with tiered seating looking out over a stage and the Mediterranean beyond. Every July it hosts the prestigious International Festival of Carthage, one of Africa's largest live music and arts festivals, making it one of the few ancient theatres still regularly used for performance 1,800 years after its construction.
📍 Carthage, Tunis, Tunisia
- 8
The largest Roman thermae ever built in Africa and among the three largest in the entire Roman Empire — constructed between 145–162 AD under Emperor Antoninus Pius, covering 35,000 square metres on the shoreline of the Mediterranean. Only the subterranean service corridors and the lower walls survive, but one reconstructed column rising 15 metres from the sea gives a visceral sense of original scale. The seaside setting, with ruins tumbling toward the water, is the most dramatic in all of Carthage.
📍 Carthage, Tunis, Tunisia
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