The Villa That Put a Fishing Village on the Map
Before the resort strip, before the package hotels along Route Touristique, Hammamet was a small fishing and orange-growing town on the Gulf of Hammamet, known mainly for the fruit and jasmine grown in its surrounding groves. That changed in 1927, when George Sebastian, a Romanian millionaire, built a villa on land just south of the town and called it Dar Sebastian. Sebastian designed the house himself, blending the clean lines of Tunisian vernacular architecture with the modernism and Art Deco sensibility he had picked up in Europe, and set it in a garden that ran straight down to the beach.
Sebastian used the villa to entertain the European artistic elite of the interwar years — the writer André Gide was a guest, along with Jean Cocteau, the painter Paul Klee, and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Word of the place spread through those circles, and Hammamet's reputation as a discovery for European artists and writers dates from exactly this period, decades before organized tourism ever reached the Tunisian coast.
A Field Marshal's Headquarters, Then a Statesman's Study
During the North African campaign of the Second World War, Dar Sebastian was requisitioned by the German army and served briefly as a headquarters for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Once the campaign moved on, the villa passed to a very different kind of occupant: Winston Churchill stayed there and used the quiet of the house to work on his war memoirs, in the same rooms that had hosted painters and novelists a decade earlier.
Sebastian himself returned to Hammamet in 1946 and lived at the villa until his death; his will asked that his ashes be scattered on the grounds, which was done. In 1966 the property passed to the Tunisian state, which converted it into the Hammamet International Cultural Centre. It still hosts exhibitions and concerts today, and its gardens are the main venue for the Hammamet International Festival, a summer program of theatre, music and dance that has run for roughly sixty years and turns the town into a stage for several weeks every year.
From Orange Groves to Tunisia's First Resort
Tunisia's post-independence government, looking for a way to build a modern economy quickly, bet heavily on tourism, and Hammamet — already known in Europe thanks to Sebastian's villa and the artists who had written about it — was the logical place to start. The first large package hotels went up along the coast beginning in the 1960s, and the local economy shifted within a generation from fishing and citrus farming to hospitality; Hammamet is generally regarded as Tunisia's first purpose-built seaside resort and grew to become the country's largest.
What kept the result from looking like a typical resort strip was an early planning decision to cap building heights at roughly the height of the surrounding trees, which is why the hotels along Route Touristique still sprawl low and horizontal behind gardens rather than rising into towers. The jasmine and orange groves that gave the area its original character are smaller now, squeezed by the hotel zone, but they have not disappeared — jasmine sellers still work the streets of the medina at dusk, threading the small white flowers into buttonholes and bracelets the way they have for generations.
The Medina the Resort Grew Up Around
Everything the modern resort added sits outside a compact walled old town that predates it by seven centuries. The Kasbah at its edge is a 13th-century fort raised on earlier Byzantine foundations, and the Medina wrapped around it is small enough to cross on foot in about twenty minutes — a scale that has more to do with how little room a working fishing town needed than with any plan for tourism. Its whitewashed lanes and sea walls are the one part of Hammamet where the town's history as a fortified North African port, rather than a 20th-century invention, is still legible at street level.
Punic Ghosts on Cap Bon
An hour and a half up the Cap Bon peninsula from Hammamet sits Kerkouane, a Phoenician-Punic town abandoned during the First Punic War around 250 BC and never resettled. Because Rome never rebuilt on top of it — unlike almost every other Punic site in the Mediterranean, which the Romans absorbed and built over — Kerkouane's house foundations, dye workshops and bathtubs survive as the clearest picture archaeologists have of how a Punic town actually functioned, untouched by a single later layer of construction. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site precisely because of that accident of abandonment, and it sits a short drive from Kelibia Fort, the Byzantine-rebuilt citadel that has guarded the tip of the peninsula since antiquity.
The Amphitheatre at the End of the Line
The other direction out of Hammamet, past Kairouan's Aghlabid-era mosque and reservoirs, the same rail line eventually reaches El Jem, a modest inland town built almost entirely in the shadow of the third-largest amphitheatre the Romans ever constructed. In the 3rd century AD, when it was raised, the town was called Thysdrus and had grown wealthy on olive oil production — wealthy enough to build an amphitheatre on the scale of the Colosseum, in a town far from Rome that most visitors today have never otherwise heard of. It stands almost complete, one of the best-preserved Roman structures anywhere outside Italy, a scale of ambition that is easy to forget sitting on a beach chair back on the coast.