The Most Beautiful Places in Tunisia
11 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Tunisia are Dougga, Amphitheatre of El Jem and Great Mosque of Kairouan. The list covers 11 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Tunisia sits where Africa reaches closest to Sicily, and for three thousand years that position drew traders and empires to its shores. Phoenician Carthage grew into Rome's great rival, Roman Africa became one of the empire's richest provinces, and the Arab conquest made Kairouan a holy city of the Maghreb. Inland, the land runs from olive groves to salt flats and the edge of the Sahara, where Berber communities built fortified granaries and mountain villages.
The Roman legacy is unusually complete. Dougga keeps a whole hillside town of temples, theatre and streets, crowned by its Capitol, and the amphitheatre of El Jem, one of the largest in the Roman world, still rises above the modern town. At Carthage, the Baths of Antoninus spread along the seafront, while at Bulla Regia wealthy residents built their villas with underground floors to escape the summer heat. The Bardo National Museum in Tunis holds one of the finest collections of Roman mosaics anywhere.
The Great Mosque of Kairouan, founded in the 7th century, is among the oldest and most influential mosques of North Africa. On Djerba, El Ghriba Synagogue is the focus of a pilgrimage centuries old. In the south, Ksar Ouled Soltane stacks its vaulted granaries several storeys high, Chebika shelters a palm oasis at the foot of a mountain, and Chott el Djerid spreads as a vast salt lake of mirages. On the coast near Tunis, Sidi Bou Said is known for its whitewashed walls and blue doors.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dougga | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Amphitheatre of El Jem | Amphitheatre | ✓ |
| 3 | Great Mosque of Kairouan | Mosque | ✓ |
| 4 | Sidi Bou Said | Most beautiful village | |
| 5 | Chott el Djerid | Salt flat | |
| 6 | Bardo National Museum | Museum | |
| 7 | Baths of Antoninus | Thermae | ✓ |
| 8 | El Ghriba Synagogue | Synagogue | |
| 9 | Ksar Ouled Soltane | Fortress | |
| 10 | Chebika | Oasis | |
| 11 | Bulla Regia | Archaeological site |
01 Dougga
Tunisia · 34.2 km from Béja36.423° N 9.220° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Emna Trabelsi · CC BY-SA 3.0 Dougga spreads across a hillside plateau in northern Tunisia, looking out over a broad valley of wheat fields and olive groves, and it gives a rare sense of what a whole small town of Roman Africa felt like.
Did you know? Evidence survives for more than twenty temples at Dougga, an unusually large number for such a small town, largely paid for by wealthy local families.
02 Amphitheatre of El Jem
Tunisia · 36.8 km from Mahdia35.296° N 10.707° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Cimoi · CC BY-SA 3.0 The amphitheatre of El Jem rises out of a small Tunisian town like something from another scale entirely: a three-storey ring of honey-coloured stone arcades, 36 metres high, looming over low houses and olive country.
Did you know? Because the sandstone is weak under load, the outer wall is about 4.5 metres thick, giving the building far more solid than void.
03 Great Mosque of Kairouan
Tunisia · 0.4 km from Kairouan35.681° N 10.104° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
weetoon66 · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Great Mosque of Kairouan, also known as the Mosque of Uqba, stands at the heart of one of the oldest cities of Islamic North Africa. Kairouan was founded in 670 by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi as a garrison town on the dry plain of central Tunisia, and a mosque was laid out at the same time.
Did you know? The minaret became the model for minarets across North Africa and al-Andalus.
04 Sidi Bou Said
Tunisia · 12.6 km from Aryanah36.870° N 10.341° E
Image by aliciacharlotte from Pixabay Sidi Bou Said sits on a headland above the Gulf of Tunis, a cliff-top village whose whitewashed walls and blue doors, shutters and window grilles have become one of the most reproduced images of North Africa.
Did you know? A mosaic six by five metres and coins of the age of Augustus show that a Roman villa once stood on the headland.
05 Chott el Djerid
Tunisia · 38 km from Tozeur33.700° N 8.433° E
Atef Ouni · CC BY-SA 4.0 Chott el Djerid is the largest salt pan of the Sahara: a flat, glaring plain of salt and mud stretching some 250 kilometres across southern Tunisia between the oasis towns of Tozeur and Nefta to the north-west and Kebili and Douz to the south-east.
Did you know? Classical authors linked the area to Lake Tritonis, described by Herodotus, which legend named as the birthplace of the goddess Athena.
06 Bardo National Museum
Tunisia · 4.1 km from Tunis36.809° N 10.134° E
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay Floors, walls and courtyards of a former royal palace are covered with ancient pictures in stone: hunters chasing boar and hares, sea gods riding through waves teeming with fish, Ulysses tied to the mast as the sirens sing, a wine jug from El Jem and builders at work on a basilica.
Did you know? Other Mahdia bronzes include a winged, olive-crowned boy identified as Eros as lord of contests and two small figures of dancing dwarfs.
07 Baths of Antoninus
Tunisia · 12.1 km from Aryanah36.854° N 10.335° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the seafront of Carthage, below the hill of Bordj Djedid, lie the remains of the largest Roman bath complex ever built in Africa.
Did you know? The cold swimming pool was a long, narrow basin of about 49 metres by just 6 metres.
08 El Ghriba Synagogue
Tunisia33.814° N 10.859° E
Noomen9 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Behind a plain whitewashed exterior in the village of Er Riadh on the island of Djerba, the El Ghriba Synagogue opens into halls lined with ceramic tiles in blue, green, yellow, brown and white, with arches and vaults linking the rooms.
Did you know? Since the late 19th century an independent committee has organised the pilgrimage and shared its revenues among village elders and Torah students.
09 Ksar Ouled Soltane
Tunisia · 23.9 km from Tataouine32.789° N 10.515° E
Ian Sewell · CC BY 2.5 Ksar Ouled Soltane is a fortified granary on a hilltop in the far south of Tunisia, and one of the most striking of the region's ksour. Its courtyards are walled in by rows of ghorfas, barrel-vaulted storage cells stacked three and four storeys high so that the facades look like honeycombs of rounded arches.
Did you know? The Phantom Menace combined ghorfas from several southern Tunisian sites, including Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Hadada, to create Mos Espa.
10 Chebika
Tunisia34.317° N 7.933° E
Keith Roper · CC BY 2.0 Chebika sits where the last ridge of the Atlas runs out into the Sahara, a few kilometres from the Algerian border in southwest Tunisia. From the plain the mountain looks bare and burnt, layered in bands of ochre and rust, yet tucked into its foot is a pocket of palms and running water.
Did you know? Roman milestones, cisterns and a fossatum, a defensive ditch of the Saharan frontier line, survive in the surroundings of the oasis.
11 Bulla Regia
Tunisia · 6.6 km from Jendouba36.559° N 8.757° E
hubbers · CC BY-SA 2.0 Bulla Regia is the Roman town that went underground.
Did you know? The amphitheatre stayed buried until 1960–61, which is why its stone edges and steps still look unusually sharp.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Tunisia?
- On our list, Dougga ranks first, followed by Amphitheatre of El Jem and Great Mosque of Kairouan.
- How big is the amphitheatre of El Jem?
- The amphitheatre of El Jem, built in the 3rd century AD, could hold around 35,000 spectators, which places it among the largest amphitheatres of the Roman Empire.
- Why did the Romans build underground houses at Bulla Regia?
- To escape the intense summer heat of the Medjerda valley, the wealthy inhabitants of Bulla Regia added cool subterranean floors beneath their villas, several of which still keep their mosaic pavements in place.
- How old is the Great Mosque of Kairouan?
- The mosque was founded in 670 by Uqba ibn Nafi, the conqueror who founded Kairouan. Its present form dates largely from the Aghlabid rebuilding in the 9th century.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Tunisia?
- In our collection, the places in Tunisia are most often archaeological sites (2), lakes (1), nature sanctuaries (1) and mosques (1).
- How many places are on this list in Tunisia?
- The list covers 11 places.