Tunisia
Tunisia Geography & Climate
Geography
Tunisia covers about 164,000 square kilometres, wedged between Algeria and Libya, and is the northernmost country on the African continent — Cape Angela sits closer to Europe than to Tunisia’s own southern border.
The north
The Atlas ranges end here as the Tell and the Dorsale, running north-east across the country and reaching 1,544 metres at Jebel Chambi. This is the green part: cork oak and pine woodland in the Kroumirie hills, the Medjerda — the only permanent river — running through a fertile valley that has been the region’s granary since Rome, and a coast of bays and headlands.
The Sahel
The central coastal plain around Sousse and Sfax is low, dry and covered in olive groves, some of them Roman in origin. Tunisia is among the world’s largest olive oil producers, and the trees are planted far apart because of the water.
The chotts
South of the Dorsale the land falls to a belt of vast salt pans. Chott el Jerid is the largest in the Sahara, about 7,000 square kilometres, dry and crusted for most of the year, shimmering and crossed by a single causeway.
The Sahara
Beyond the chotts the country becomes the Grand Erg Oriental, a sand sea of dunes running into Algeria, with the oasis towns of Tozeur, Nefta and Douz on its northern edge.
Below sea level
Parts of the chott basins lie beneath sea level, which produced one of the more persistent engineering fantasies of the nineteenth century: a French scheme to cut a canal from the Gulf of Gabes and flood the depression into an inland Saharan sea. Surveys eventually showed the basins were both too shallow and too high for it to work as imagined, and the idea was abandoned, but it resurfaces periodically.
Islands and coast
About 1,300 kilometres of Mediterranean shore, with Djerba and the Kerkennah islands off the eastern coast, low and flat.
Climate Patterns
Tunisia spans three climate zones over a fairly short distance, and the difference between the north coast and the Sahara is the single most important thing to plan around.
The north
Properly Mediterranean: mild wet winters around 12 to 17°C with most of the year’s rain between October and March, and warm dry summers around 30 to 33°C, tempered on the coast by sea breezes. The Kroumirie hills are the wettest part of the country and get genuinely heavy winter rain, with snow on the higher ground.
The centre
Semi-arid, with rainfall dropping quickly inland. Sfax and Kairouan are hot and dry in summer and cool in winter, and this is where the olive groves are spaced widest.
The south
Desert. Summer temperatures at Tozeur, Douz and Kebili regularly pass 45°C, and the record for the country sits above 50. Rainfall is under a hundred millimetres a year and can fail entirely. The crucial point for visitors is the daily range: the same desert that hits 45°C by day can fall near freezing on a winter night, and an overnight dune camp in January needs serious warm clothing.
The sirocco
The chehili blows north off the Sahara in late spring and summer, raising temperatures sharply and carrying dust that can close roads and reduce visibility for days.
Water as the long problem
Tunisia is among the more water-stressed countries in the world, and the pattern is worsening: rainfall is falling, the reservoirs in the north have run low enough in recent years to force rationing, and the southern oases depend on fossil groundwater being drawn faster than it is replaced. It is the reason a resort pool and a golf course here are not neutral choices in the way they might be elsewhere on the Mediterranean.
The sea
Around 25 to 27°C from July to September, and swimmable from May into November.