Why Tunis needs a local guide
Tunis has a 1,300-year-old Medina with 700 historical monuments packed inside its walls. The Bardo Museum holds the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics. Sidi Bou Said, the blue-and-white hilltop village 20km away, is where Paul Klee painted in 1914 and decided to become a colorist.
Tunisia welcomed around 9 million visitors last year, but most headed straight to the beach resorts in Hammamet or Djerba. Tunis, the capital, gets overlooked even though it holds a 1,300-year-old Medina with 700 monuments crammed inside its walls. The Bardo Museum, housed in a former palace, contains the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics and is almost always half-empty. Sidi Bou Said, the blue-and-white hilltop village 20km up the coast, is where Paul Klee arrived in 1914, looked at the light, and decided to become a colorist. To become a tour guide in Tunis is to navigate a city that most North Africa tourists skip entirely. You walk visitors through the Medina's souk corridors where perfume sellers, copper workers, and chechia hat makers still operate from stalls their families have held for generations. You teach them to eat brik without breaking the egg yolk, a point of pride that separates locals from tourists at every street-side stall. If you want to become a tour guide in Tunis, you need to move through the Medina without a map, bargain in Tunisian Arabic, and know which cafe off the Zitouna Mosque courtyard serves the best mint tea with pine nuts. Becoming a tour guide in Tunis means introducing visitors to a North African capital that has Carthage in its suburbs, Rome in its museum, and 1,300 years of daily life packed behind its walls.