Walk Tunis and keep every lane

FOG hides the entire world under fog. The souks, Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the quiet lanes above Bab Souika: whatever you walk is uncovered, permanently.

Two cities that meet at a gate

Tunis is two street plans sitting side by side. East of Porte de France is the ville nouvelle, a French colonial grid on flat ground with Avenue Habib Bourguiba running down the middle under its double row of ficus trees and long straight side streets crossing it at right angles. It is easy walking and it covers quickly.

West of that gate is the medina, a thousand years older and following no plan at all. Lanes narrow to shoulder width, climb toward the Zitouna Mosque at the high point, run under vaulted roofs in the souks, and end without warning at a courtyard door. It is one of the more complete old cities in North Africa, and it is small enough to walk properly, which is a rare combination.

An afternoon from the avenue into the souks

Start at the clock tower end of Avenue Habib Bourguiba and walk the full length of the avenue west to Porte de France. Go through the gate onto Rue Jamaa Ez Zitouna and follow it uphill through the stalls to the mosque. From there pick any direction other than the one you arrived from and keep going. The souks around the mosque are the dense part, and the residential quarters beyond them are quieter and much easier to cover cleanly.

Come out on the north side near Bab Souika, then drop back into the ville nouvelle on a different street to the one you used going in. Two or three hours does the whole spine plus a good share of the medina core.

The medina is where the map gets interesting

Filling the ville nouvelle is fast and satisfying. The blocks are regular, the streets go through, and a couple of walks turn the whole quarter solid. The medina is the opposite, and it is the reason to bother with Tunis on foot in the first place.

Lanes there fork, rejoin and dead end constantly. Clearing a quarter means walking into the dead ends knowing they are dead ends, coming back out, and taking the next one. What you get on the map is a dense knot of short lines that looks nothing like the tidy rectangles next door, and completing it is real work rather than an afternoon.

Beyond the centre the city spreads out toward the lake and along the coast, where blocks get bigger, distances stretch and the walking gets a lot less interesting per kilometre.

Heat, shade and signal

July and August are hot enough that the sensible plan is early morning, then nothing until the evening. Spring and autumn are close to ideal. Winters are mild with rain in bursts, and the covered stretches of the souks stay walkable through weather that clears the open avenue completely.

Positioning inside the medina is the thing to expect trouble with. The walls are high, the lanes are narrow and long sections of the souks are roofed, so a trail can drift a lane sideways or lose a corner entirely. Walking the same lane again from the other end usually fixes it. Out on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, with open sky overhead, it behaves.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

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