Tunis is two cities stitched together by one gate.

01 The medina, 280 hectares

The medina of Tunis has been on the World Heritage list since 1979, covers some 280 hectares and preserves on the order of seven hundred monuments: palaces, mausoleums, madrasas, fountains. It is not a preserved stage set but an inhabited, working neighborhood.

Its shape is explained in layers. The central core is old, from the 8th century, and the northern and southern suburbs were added in the 13th. Between the 12th and 16th centuries, under the Almohads and the Hafsids, this was one of the richest and most populous cities of its world, and that prosperity shows in the density of what was built.

02 The new city and its grid

East of the medina something else begins. The new city was laid out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on ground reclaimed from the water, with rectangular blocks, wide pavements and a central tree-lined avenue that works as an urban living room.

The scale changes completely here: café terraces, five- or six-storey buildings, shop windows and a strolling rhythm that would be unthinkable inside the medina. It is the part of Tunis a European visitor recognizes instantly, and for that very reason the part that says least about the city.

03 The gate between the two

The seam is a single gate, Bab el Bhar, the old sea gate. For centuries it marked the limit of the walled city on the side facing the water; today the wall is gone and the arch stands free in the middle of a square.

Crossing it takes three seconds and changes everything: the straight street ends and the souk begins, car noise fades and workshop noise rises, and orientation stops depending on a map and starts depending on memory. Few cities offer such a short transition between two ways of building.

04 The lake, the sea and the train line

Tunis does not face the Mediterranean directly: it faces a lagoon, the Lake of Tunis, joined to the gulf by a canal ending at the port of La Goulette. That shallow sheet of water is the first thing you see from any height in the city, with the double profile of Bou Kornine on the far side.

The lake also organizes movement. A light rail line crosses toward the coast and connects within minutes to Carthage, Sidi Bou Said and La Marsa. Which is to say: the archaeological site and the most photographed white village in the country are, in practice, neighborhoods of the capital.

05 The afterimage

What stays with you from Tunis is the contrast, and the fact that you cover it on foot. In a quarter of an hour you move from a covered souk to an avenue of ficus trees, and from there to a platform that takes you to the sea.

It is a capital that does not need to be spectacular because it is dense. Its merit lies not in one monument but in how many different things fit into very little space, and in how clearly you feel, crossing a gate, where one logic ends and another begins.