Africa's first beach resort — a jasmine-scented medina where Paul Klee painted his most famous watercolours in 1914, and a 30km arc of white sand along the Gulf of Hammamet is one of the Mediterranean's finest coasts
Hammamet is a coastal city of 100,000 in northeastern Tunisia, 65km south of Tunis on the Gulf of Hammamet. It was North Africa's first purpose-built beach tourism destination, developed in the 1960s around its historic medina — a whitewashed walled quarter surrounded by orange and jasmine groves that give the city its signature scent. The city has two faces: the authentic Old Hammamet with its 15th-century kasbah and medina, and modern Yasmine Hammamet to the south, with 80+ hotels and one of Tunisia's largest artisan souks.
Hammamet's medina was built by the Hafsid dynasty in the 15th century as a fortified coastal town; the kasbah (fortress) dates to around 1463. The Swiss-German painter Paul Klee visited in April 1914 and experienced what he called his artistic epiphany — his Hammamet watercolours, with their geometric shapes and luminous colour blocks absorbed from North African light, represent one of modernism's pivot points and are now in museums from Bern to New York. The Romanian millionaire George Sebastian built a Neo-Moorish villa here in 1920 (now the Villa Sebastian Cultural Centre) that became a li…