Heritage & Culture

Three peoples, three landscapes, and a settlement pattern eight centuries old that is still lived in rather than preserved.

Over a thousand stone circles stand along a single river, built across more than fifteen centuries by a society we know mainly from its graves.

Most World Heritage properties are listed under two or three criteria. Gorée carries one, and that single line is the whole argument.

UNESCO inscribed Djerba for a settlement pattern built by communities of different faiths, and names the synagogue and the churches among its parts.

Tunisian cooking is the spiciest in the Maghreb and harissa is the reason. Both the paste and the couscous around it are inscribed by UNESCO.

Tunisia is Arab, Amazigh and Mediterranean at once, and its craft traditions are inscribed heritage rather than souvenir production.

Probably the first capital of the Numidian kingdom, and called by UNESCO the best preserved Africo-Roman town in North Africa.

Founded from Tyre and inscribed in 1979, Carthage was the metropolis of Punic civilization in Africa before Rome rebuilt it as a capital.

The only known Punic city in the Mediterranean that Rome never built over. Abandoned in the third century BC and never reinhabited since.

Founded in 670 AD, the oldest Arabo-Muslim base in the Maghreb and capital of Ifriqiya for five centuries. Its Great Mosque became the model.

Founded in 698 AD and inscribed in 1979, some 700 historic monuments across 280 hectares, and a city that was once among the richest in the Arab world.

UNESCO records Gnawa as beginning with people taken in the slave trade. Morocco is where the Sahara met the Atlantic, and its heritage list says so plainly.