Tunisia: Hammamet – Sun, Souks & Mediterranean Magic Await

🌊 North to Hammamet — Tunisia’s Riviera and Why It Almost Made Me Want to Stay

We pushed further north up the Tunisian coast, heading for Hammamet. Our guide Zied had mentioned it a couple of times already, and there was something in the way he said the name — a slight pause, a mild satisfaction — that suggested this was somewhere worth paying attention to. He was right, as it turned out. Though I wouldn’t tell him that. He seemed entirely too pleased with himself already.

🏙️ The Tunisian Riviera — Yes, Really

Hammamet sits on the northeastern tip of Tunisia, tucked into a broad bay where the Gulf of Hammamet meets the Cap Bon peninsula. It’s been described, with admirable confidence given the competition, as the Tunisian Riviera. One might raise an eyebrow at that. The French Riviera has Cannes, Monaco, and decades of film festival glamour. Hammamet has bougainvillaea and a moderately priced restaurant serving harissa with everything. And yet — and here’s the thing — it works. The comparison isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds.

The town has been attracting visitors for well over a century. In the early twentieth century it developed a reputation as something of an artists’ retreat. The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși visited. The Swiss-German painter Paul Klee came and stayed, reportedly rather taken by the quality of the light — which, at around three in the afternoon when we arrived, was genuinely extraordinary. Warm, slightly golden, the sort of light that makes even a concrete wall look interesting. I’m told this coastal clarity is what’s been drawing people here for decades, and I can believe it.

The modern resort infrastructure — the big hotels, the golf courses, the sprawl of Hammamet-Yasmine to the north — arrived properly in the 1960s and accelerated sharply in the 1980s and 1990s. Tunisia made a deliberate decision to develop a tourism industry, and Hammamet was central to that plan. It worked, perhaps a little too well in some respects. But the original town, the Medina, the old quarter tucked behind its walls — that had been here far longer.

🕌 Into the Medina

The Medina of Hammamet is, by most estimates, somewhere around eight hundred years old, its walls and core layout dating back to the Hafsid period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Hafsids were a Berber dynasty who ruled much of what is now Tunisia for about three centuries — competent, relatively stable, and responsible for a decent amount of building work across the region. The fortified walls around the Medina, whitewashed and solid, still carry that sense of purpose. They were not built for tourists. They were built to keep people out.

These days, of course, the people coming through the gates are mostly tourists, which does rather change the atmosphere. As we passed through, Zied offered the useful comparison — rather fewer people than Sousse. And it was true. Sousse’s Medina, a UNESCO World Heritage site and something of a magnet for large tour groups, can feel genuinely overwhelming at busy times. Hammamet, by contrast, was calmer. The lanes were narrower, the light filtered differently between the buildings, and there was a sense that the place was going about its business at a slightly more measured pace.

There were art galleries tucked into small vaulted spaces — genuine ones, with local work, not just postcards and magnets. Boutique shops selling ceramics, linen, leather goods. A few cafés where people were sitting with mint tea rather than rushing to catch the next bus. It still held what I can only describe as an old-world unhurriedness. Which is not nothing, in a town that has spent the past forty years enthusiastically inviting the modern world in through the front gate.

Zied walked us slowly through the lanes, pointing out the kinds of detail you’d miss entirely on your own — a carved doorframe from the Ottoman period, a small fountain that had been there for centuries, the subtle difference between the plasterwork in the older sections and the newer restorations. He was good at this. He never crowded you with information, just dropped it in when it seemed relevant, which is a skill that’s harder than it looks.

⚰️ A Moment by the Mosque

We came to the mosque near the centre of the Medina — the Grand Mosque, a quiet, cream-coloured building that has stood in various forms since the fifteenth century — and found ourselves pausing at the entrance. Not because we intended to linger, but because something was happening.

A group of men had gathered. A funeral. The coffin, covered in a green cloth — green being the colour associated with Islam, with paradise, with the Prophet — was being carried into the mosque by a line of mourners, all of them composed, unhurried, absorbed in something that had nothing whatsoever to do with tourism or day trips or the price of ceramic plates in the shop around the corner.

We stopped. You couldn’t not stop.

Islamic funeral practice moves relatively quickly by Western standards. The body is typically washed, wrapped in white cloth, and buried within twenty-four hours of death. The prayers — the Salat al-Janazah — are recited communally, often at the mosque, and then the burial follows. There’s a directness to it, a lack of elaborate ceremony, that can seem stark to outsiders but speaks to something deeply held about the relationship between this life and whatever comes next.

We stood a little way back and watched for a moment. I’m not sure any of us spoke. It was one of those brief intersections with real life that tend to bring a day into sharper focus. We were visitors, passing through. This was someone’s loss, someone’s grief, someone’s community going about the most ordinary and profound business of human existence. It was a reminder — unnecessary perhaps, but welcome — that we were guests in a place with its own interior life, one that continued entirely independently of whether we were there to observe it or not.

🌅 The Town That Invites You to Slow Down

We carried on along the coast after leaving the Medina, and Hammamet began to show a different face. The sea was close — always close — and there was a breeze coming off the water that took the edge off the afternoon heat. The light had shifted slightly, going from golden to something cooler and bluer, and the whole place had a quality that I can only describe, inadequately, as restful.

I don’t say that often. I am not, by temperament or inclination, a particularly restful person, and I am instinctively suspicious of places that market themselves on the basis of calmness. Usually they mean empty. Or dull. Or both. But Hammamet wasn’t those things. There was activity — people moving through the streets, children, traders, the background murmur of a working town — but it moved at a pace that didn’t demand anything of you. You could stand still and the world didn’t seem impatient for you to get out of the way.

The coastline here, the broad sandy beaches that stretch north from the old town toward the purpose-built Yasmine district, has been drawing visitors since long before the big resort hotels arrived. The cap Bon peninsula’s climate is famously mild — warmer and drier than much of northern Tunisia, sheltered from the harsher conditions of the interior. The Romans knew about this part of the coast. There are the ruins of Pupput, an ancient Roman settlement, not far away, evidence of people who understood, two thousand years ago, that this was a decent spot to build something.

We found ourselves, at some point during the afternoon, actually talking about coming back. This is not something I do lightly. I am British, which means I have a national talent for the mild complaint and a deeply embedded suspicion of enthusiasm. But something about Hammamet made us think in terms of more time rather than less. A longer stay. A slower pace. The possibility of actually sitting still somewhere.

Which is, I suppose, exactly what the place wanted us to think. Very clever, Hammamet.