Tunisian Beaches, Crafts and History Attract 4 Million Visitors Annually

by Richard H. Curtiss

Tunisia has fewer than nine million inhabitants, but its miles of white sand beaches, its colorful oriental souqs and handicrafts, and its dozens of major archeological sites and historic monuments, national parks and wildlife refuges attracted 4,119,847 foreign visitors in 1995. As a result, the tourism industry now is second only to agriculture as Tunisia’s largest employer and foreign exchange earner.

Tourism, which also provides recreational facilities for Tunisia’s own large middle class, directly employs 63,000 people, such as hotel workers, and indirectly employs another 250,000 people, such as taxi drivers. It has given birth to entire new industries such as greenhouses to supply the country’s hotels and restaurants with year-round fresh fruits and vegetables, and revived old occupations such as “camel men” to cater to tourists wanting to ride or be photographed on one of the once-prevalent “ships of the desert.”

Although many foreign visitors take at least a day to visit one or more of the desert oases or caravan stops that once characterized Tunisian culture, the country’s most popular attractions are its beach resorts, which match those anywhere in the Mediterranean, but at prices significantly lower than those at similar resorts in nearby Spain, France or Italy.

Contributing to the rapid growth of Tunisian tourism are investors from the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf and the Arab development banks in which the Gulf countries have their petroleum earnings. Such investors have worked closely with Tunisia’s Ministry of Tourism to develop whole new tourist complexes outside the major cities. These complexes have the dual advantage of cushioning the shock of thousands of European tourists descending on Tunisia and also of providing jobs in relatively rural (and unspoiled) areas. This in turn reduces the urban migration that has brought almost a fourth of Tunisia's population to live in Tunis, the capital, and its expanding suburbs.

Among such tourist complexes are Port El Kantaoui, built around a 300-yacht marina set among sand beaches just outside Sousse, an attractive major town south of Tunis. Visitors can browse through Sousse’s ancient medina, a perfectly preserved walled city now home to myriad craft shops as well as mosaics and catacombs dating to Roman times and Islamic monuments dating to the 9th century A.D. Outside Sousse, the government has built Port El Kantaoui, the first and so far the largest of Tunisia’s planned tourism centers. Although the buildings all were constructed recently, they are built in the architectural style of Sidi Bou Said, a picturesque village overlooking the sea on the northern outskirts of ancient Carthage, which in turn is now a suburb of Tunis.

El Kantaoui, which has residential villas and apartments as well as hotel rooms for tourists, offers a variety of restaurants, water sports, glass-bottomed boats, a casino, nightclubs and a 27-hole golf course.

One of Tunisia’s newest tourist complexes is at Tabarka, a two-hour drive northwest of Tunis adjacent to the Algerian border where the eastern foothills of the Atlas mountain range meet the sea. On this portion of Tunisia’s northern “coral coast,” in an area of wind- and water-sculptured sandstone, clear waters perfect for snorkelers and scuba divers, and white sand beaches, the Tunisian government has promoted a major joint venture with the Kuwait Development Bank.

In an area where wealthy Tunisians and European visitors have for years built hideaway villas on slopes overlooking a small fishing harbor and ancient castle dating back to the days of the Barbary pirates and earlier, there now are shopping arcades and a spectacular hotel of the country-wide Abu Nawas chain. The hotel, opened in 1993 on a beach with gentle surf, also features an Olympic-size swimming pool and an 18-hole golf course.

Similar new visitor complexes push tourist horizons further and further southward toward the Libyan border and Tunisia’s sparsely inhabited desert interior. The most popular of these southern resorts is Jerba, an island inhabited from the beginnings of history and with a culture all its own. Heavily wooded and with gentle, protected beaches, the island long has been a magnet for European tourists.

Tunisia’s impressive tourism development began in 1960, only four years after it obtained its independence from France. The country’s annual wave of tourists, who stay an average of nine days each, brings in a flood of hard currency which helps account for the fact that Tunisia, although only recently self-sufficient in petroleum, is a moderately prosperous country without the sharp contrasts between rich and poor characteristic of the Third World. Although Tunisia’s per capita domestic product is well below that of its oil- and gas-rich neighbors, Libya and Algeria, Tunisia rates higher than either on most indexes of the quality of life. In fact, large numbers of Algerians and Libyans visit Tunisia for vacations, shopping and medical treatment, as do visitors from such distant parts of the Arab world as Saudi Arabia and the Arab states of the Gulf.

Travel in any direction from Tunis reveals prosperous small towns and villages whose people, particularly in the heavily populated north, are indistinguishable in dress and demeanor from those in the sophisticated national capital. In fact, ethnically diverse Tunisians are homogenized by their shared Muslim religion and Arabic language. Crowds promenading afternoons and evenings on the tree-shaded Avenue Habib Bourguiba in the heart of Tunis, with older men in suits and ties, their wives in Western dresses and the young of both sexes in jeans, cutoffs and even shorts, resemble crowds in nearby Mediterranean cities of Spain, France and Italy.

While most of Tunisia’s winter tourists are from sun-starved Germany, England and northern Europe, in the summer the northern European vacationers are joined by huge numbers of tourists from the Mediterranean countries of Europe. Tunisian tourist facilities are comparable to their own, but the summer resorts are far less expensive and still not as crowded.

Germany slightly leads France in numbers of annual visitors to Tunisia, with more than half a million visitors each, followed by Italy and England in third and fourth places, respectively. Some 80 percent of these European visitors come on charter or group tours, and more than a quarter million of them interrupt their seaside vacations for at least a one-day excursion into the desert.

In 1995 there were 13,500 Canadian visitors to Tunisia, many of them from French-speaking Quebec province, and 12,000 visitors from the United States. These tourists are as likely to come for the country’s unique archeological and cultural heritage as for its beaches and crafts.

The country’s museums display relics of Tunisia’s many civilizations. The spectacular Bardo Museum in Tunis has one of the finest collections of Roman mosaics in the world. A newer museum has been established at Carthage, founded by a Phoenician queen from Tyre in present-day Lebanon. Carthage became the center of a seafaring civilization that linked the cities of Egypt, Persia, and the eastern Mediterranean in the east to the Iberian Peninsula, the British Isles, and even the coasts of West Africa more than 2,000 years ago. There are regional museums in Tunisia’s other major cities.

There also are specialized tours. In 1993 the Tunisian government invited veterans of the great World War II battles in North Africa for the 50th anniversary of the May 13, 1943 surrender on Tunisia’s Cap Bon Peninsula of a quarter of a million troops of Germany’s crack Afrika Corps to combined U.S., British and Free French forces after Allied air and naval forces prevented the retreating Germans from escaping to Europe.

There also is an annual pilgrimage of Sephardic Jews now living mostly in France but with ancestral roots in Tunisia to an ancient synagogue on the island of Jerba. The synagogue is maintained by a small residual Jewish community living quietly among the tourist installations on the island’s popular beaches.

In 1994 the first charter groups of tourists began arriving in Tunisia from Eastern Europe. Tunisia now maintains tourism representatives in Prague, Bratislava and Moscow. There also are regular tour groups which brought 10,000 Japanese tourists to Tunisia last year. The Japanese visitors show particular interest in Tunisian handicrafts, and Tunisia’s Ministry of Tourism now is working to encourage tourists from South Korea and other Far Eastern countries.

Quality control is one reason for the flourishing of Tunisian handicrafts, which include incomparable ceramics, unique and instantly distinguishable oriental rugs that incorporate elements of Berber design as well as traditional Middle Eastern motifs, tile work famous throughout the Middle East, leather work, and now designer clothing competitive with that produced in Europe both in terms of price and design.

Every Tunisian rug bears a government label which precisely describes the length, width, total area and weight, and grades the rug on the basis of thickness and knots per square centimeter. In addition to the hundreds of small handicraft dealers in every town and resort, the Tunisian Ministry of Tourism and Handicrafts also maintains in the capital the Artisanat, a large showroom of virtually every kind of handicraft produced in Tunis. All of the products in the Artisanat are sold at clearly marked fixed prices.

For the visitor in a hurry, it is one-stop handicraft shopping. For visitors who have the time, it is an opportunity to become familiar with the handicrafts available, and also fair prices for them. Adventuresome visitors then can scour the souqs for something even closer to their tastes, and also bargain for better prices.

This combination of free enterprise under close government regulation works. Last year its handicrafts brought $185,623,260 to Tunisia. The Tunisian Ministry of Tourism and Handicrafts also has established an Artisanat showroom in Marseilles. At the same time the ministry is looking for private entrepreneurs to provide new outlets for Tunisian handicrafts in other countries.

Such Tunisian outlets in every major country abroad are not an impossible dream. They are certainly no more unlikely than the dream of Tunisian planners in 1960 that the small North African country wedged between Algeria and Libya might, in a generation or two, attract far more visitors than its two larger neighbors combined, and at the same time enjoy a level of individual prosperity that would be the envy of any country on the entire continent of Africa.