Why now
Good time in March: 21°C days, sea 16°C.
Spring and autumn are the seasons for walking the medina and Carthage's exposed sites; summer is hot and the city empties to the coast, with the Carthage festival in the Roman theatre in the evenings. Ramadan closes many restaurants by day, and the medina shuts early on Sundays.
Best months here: September, October, November. March is not one of them — the label above measures the month against a fixed bar, not against the rest of the year here. Daytime highs, sea temperature and rainy days from three years of Open-Meteo reanalysis; a rainy day is one with at least 1 mm of rain, which is the WMO threshold and not the same as "it drizzled".
The place
Tunis is a UNESCO medina, a French Ville Nouvelle along Avenue Habib Bourguiba and, along the TGM light rail line, the ruins of Carthage and the blue-and-white cliff village of Sidi Bou Said. The scale is manageable and the tourism is light for a capital with this much to see. It suits people who want Roman mosaics, an unhassled medina and a Mediterranean suburb with a view, in a long weekend.
What you can do
- 01Spend a morning in the Bardo Museum's Roman mosaics, the largest collection anywhere, in a beylical palace.
- 02Walk the medina from Bab el Bhar to the Zitouna Mosque, through the souks and the Dar Ben Abdallah museum.
- 03Take the TGM to Carthage's Byrsa hill, the Antonine baths and the Punic ports, spread over several stops.
- 04Drink mint tea with pine nuts at Café des Nattes in Sidi Bou Said, then walk down to the marina.
- 05Eat brik and lablabi in a medina eatery, and a fish couscous at La Goulette on the way back.
Where to stay · neighbourhoods
Stay in a medina guesthouse for the city or in Sidi Bou Said for the sea and evenings; the Ville Nouvelle is fine for convenience if the medina feels too enclosed.
Unusual things
- ◦Dar Lasram in the medina, an eighteenth-century palace housing the association that has been restoring the old city.
- ◦The Ennejma Ezzahra palace in Sidi Bou Said, Baron d'Erlanger's house, with a centre for Arab and Mediterranean music.
- ◦The Tophet of Carthage, the Punic child-sanctuary of stelae under trees, unsettling and usually empty.
Day trips
Flight options
Routes come from OpenFlights (historical) and a 2026 route reference compiled from public timetables. Durations are the published schedule where we have it, otherwise a block-time model fitted on measured nonstop flights. Verify schedules with the airline before booking.
Entry requirements · IT passport
Source: passport-index-data, March 2026 (coarse indicator), covering 258 of our 268 destinations for each of 199 passports. Always confirm with the destination's official site.
Airports
Distances are centre to airport derived · nonstop counts are our route reference for 2026, not every flight that exists.
Local transport
- Airport to city
- Taxi, 20 min, ~€6
- Car needed?
- No — walkable or good public transport
- Getting around
- The TGM line, the metro trams and cheap taxis cover the city and coast; louages, shared minibuses, are the way to Hammamet and beyond. Tunis-Carthage Airport is 20 minutes from the centre by taxi.
- Clock
- 1 hour ahead of Lisbon (Africa/Tunis) derived
- Daylight
- 11.9 hours of daylight in March · sunrise 06:32, sunset 18:26 derived
- Currency
- TND
Good to know
Central Tunis and the coast are generally calm, but check your government's advice, which usually excludes the Algerian and Libyan border areas and the Chaambi mountains; taxi drivers occasionally decline the meter at the airport.
Alternatives at a similar price
Whole trip per person for 4 days from Lisbon in March, then the flight time; estimates, like the total above.
Cape Verde
Cairo
Hurghada
Seville
Fuerteventura
Agadir