No car, no taxi meter to argue over, just three walking routes that cover almost everything worth seeing in and around the capital. The Medina of Tunis Historical Heritage Walk enters through Bab el Bhar (Porte de France) and runs about 3 miles through narrow, covered stone alleyways. Inside, the Ez-Zitouna Mosque opens onto a vast marble courtyard ringed by antique Roman columns, reused from Carthage when the mosque was built in the 8th century.

A capital city with wild falcons nesting on its coastline within day-trip range is not something you get in most places, and Tunis barely advertises it. The Cap Bon Peninsula, southeast of the city, has a coastal hiking trail out to Ghar el Kebir near El Haouaria, ancient Punic sandstone quarries where falcons still nest on the sheer sea cliffs above the water. It takes planning to get out there and back in a day, but it is the wildest stretch of coastline within easy reach of the capital.

Tunis is not really a one-city trip once you look at what sits within a few hours of it, and the honest answer is that most visitors under-plan how far this base city can stretch. The Northern Heritage and Roman Africa Circuit runs 3 to 4 days and stays entirely in the north. Day one covers the Tunis medina, the Bardo Museum, Carthage, and Sidi Bou Said, all reachable in a single busy day.

Kids who would sit down and refuse to walk another step through a normal ruin will happily crawl through this one, because the appeal at this stop is exploring, not looking at signage. At Carthage, the Baths of Antoninus have underground vaulted brick chambers where Roman furnace slaves once stoked the heating fires, and children can walk through them and then scramble along seaside ruins right beside the crashing Mediterranean surf outside.

Skip Carthage for a day. It is only 15 minutes away and will still be there next week; the ruins worth burning a full day on are further out, and every one of them is reachable and back before dinner. Dougga (Thugga), 110 km southwest and 1.5 to 2 hours by private car or louage through Téboursouk, is widely considered the most complete Roman ruin left standing in North Africa. It sits on a dramatic hillside above wheat valleys, and the highlights alone justify the drive: the soaring Capitoline Temple dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, a 3,500-seat theater still used for performances, Roman bathhouses, and the strange 2nd-century BCE Libyco-Punic Tower Mausoleum, a funerary monument unlike anything else on the site.

Two completely different bus experiences operate in Tunis, and knowing which one you actually need saves a wasted morning at the wrong station. The visitor-facing option is the open-top sightseeing bus, a double-decker route connecting downtown Tunis at Place du 14 Janvier with Carthage (stopping near the Baths of Antoninus and Byrsa Hill), Sidi Bou Said, and La Marsa. It runs multilingual audio commentary and a single ticket, priced around 25 to 35 TND, covers the whole loop with hop-on, hop-off privileges.

Most capitals make you choose one big sight per day. Tunis does not, because its three headline attractions sit close enough together that a single well-planned day covers all of them without a rushed feeling anywhere. Start with the Bardo National Museum, housed in a 13th-century Hafsid and Ottoman palace with carved plaster ceilings and chandeliers still in place over the display halls. This is the world’s largest collection of Roman mosaics under one roof, and three panels are worth planning your route around: the Virgil Mosaic from Hadrumetum, showing the poet seated between the muses Melpomene and Clio as he writes a line of the Aeneid; the Triumph of Neptune, a 130-square-meter bath mosaic from Sousse with Neptune riding a seahorse-drawn chariot; and Ulysses and the Sirens, Odysseus lashed to his mast while the fatal song plays out around him.