The offbeat African island that German tourists love, but Britons have yet to discover

Telegraph

29-03-2025

The mid-morning scene around the enormous sun-trap courtyard at the Radisson Blu Palace Resort & Thalasso is unremarkable in that way of late-spring mornings on the African edge of the Mediterranean. The sky and the swimming pool are engaged in an obvious conspiracy, coordinating their colours to the exact same shade of patented holiday blue. And if the sea cannot quite match them, still shivering in a winter coat of surly green-grey, then the outdoor temperature – an affable 20°C in March – is certainly selling Tunisia as a year-round destination to those who like to doze on loungers.
The only note of the unusual is in the voices emanating from those day beds. Unusual, that is, if you hail from the UK. Ordinarily, you would expect to hear plenty of your compatriots in a beach hotel within a three-hour flight of Britain's cold-season gloom, but the majority of chats with staff here are in flawless French, or a German-accented version thereof. A smattering of Gallic pleasantries – a bonjour and merci here, a s'il vous plaît there – sweetens general conversation, and, if you shut your eyes and switch off, you might just fancy yourself on the Cote d'Azur.
This, in itself, is not a surprise. Djerba – which, at 198 square miles, is not just the largest island in Tunisia, but the biggest island in North Africa – has long been a magnet for visitors from Bordeaux and Berlin, package-holidaymakers from Strasbourg and Stuttgart; indeed, from almost every major city in France and Germany.
On landing some 36 hours earlier, I found myself running my eyes down the departures board, counting 11 French airports (including regional dots on the map, such as Montpellier and Nantes) and eight German hubs. By contrast, only two British place-names were up in lights: Manchester and the very London-Luton, from which I had flown earlier that afternoon.
The absence of Djerba from UK tourists' radars is one of travel's more enduring puzzles – not least because the Tunisian mainland is well known to British sun-seekers. True, the relationship has not always been a happy one: you could easily point to the Sousse terror attack of June 2015 – which took the lives of 38 resort guests, 30 of them British – as the cause of an understandable reluctance to visit.
But while that tragedy has largely destroyed the popularity of Tunisia's third biggest city as a convenient holiday option (no airline currently flies to Sousse directly from the UK), it has not quashed British interest in the country among those in the know – nor its affordability.
Last year, 278,000 of us visited, holidaymaker-levels inching their way back towards the high tidemark of 497,000 recorded in (pre-atrocity) 2014. You can currently choose between 19 flight routes from Britain to Hammamet – a cheery enclave some 60 miles north of Sousse, on the east coast. And, should you wish to book a week or fortnight in an all-inclusive property, prices tend to be much lower than those charged by beach hotels on the European side of the Mediterranean.
No, the reason for Djerba's relative anonymity is more mundane. You might call it a case of chicken and egg, but, historically, there have been very few flights to the island from the UK – and, as a result, very few British tourists upon it. So, easyJet's recent decision to add Djerba to its network may prove a game-changer. The low-cost carrier is already responsible for 10 of those 19 routes to Hammamet. As of November, it is also behind the twin flights to Djerba from Luton and Manchester, delivering two services per week from each airport.
This is surely shrewd thinking – after all, all those satisfied French and German customers indicate that Djerba is a nut worth cracking. There are underlying statistics to support this theory, too. In total, Tunisia draws in around nine million foreign tourists each year, with just under a quarter of those visitors (around two million) travelling to its biggest island.
In doing so, they are following a well-worn track. British tourists may not have familiarised themselves with its charms, but Djerba has been a coveted corner of the Mediterranean for centuries. It felt the footprints of the ancient world – of the Greek and Phoenician sea-farers who crossed the water to the African coast, and of the Romans who supplanted them. As with much of the region, it came under the control of mighty Arab caliphates in the seventh century, then under the heel of the Ottoman Empire. Later, it found itself meshed into the colonial era, as the various European powers peered south hungrily in the 19th century – entering a period of French rule that lasted from 1881 until 1956.
You can also glimpse the island beyond these eras, back amid the mists of mythology. Djerba has a close association with the most feted of the Greek sagas, The Odyssey, and is often cited as its 'Island of the Lotus-Eaters'. This was a place of woozy indolence, populated by dreamers in thrall to the 'Lotus Tree' and the apathy-inducing effects of its fruit – a self-contented, closed world from which Odysseus and his men only just escape.
The overall result of these ingrained influences (the definitively factual ones, in any case) is an island inspires exploration beyond the capacious hotels of its north coast.
In fact, you don't have to venture far to find overlapping layers. Just eight miles inland, the small town of Erriadh combines St Joseph's (Catholic) Church in the Houmt Souk neighbourhood with whitewashed mosques to complete an Abrahamic religious tapestry.
On its outskirts, the El Ghriba Synagogue makes an epic (unverified) claim: to being the planet's oldest, pinning its origins to Jewish settlers who fled the Holy Land after the Babylonian invasion – and the destruction of the Temple of Solomon – in 586BC. You will struggle to spot any clear physical evidence of such antiquity in a complex that largely dates back to the 19th century, but there is a calm beauty to the building, with sunlight angling onto blue-tiled walls through high windows.
My guide for the day inadvertently underscores the fact that I am a stranger in a strange land. On meeting me, Gamaal Sfaxi apologises profusely for his 'poor' (although, of course, pretty much fluent) grasp of English. 'It has been 27 years since I learned it. I am far more used to speaking in French or German,' he says, with a polite shake of the head.
He is on a surer footing with Erriadh's Djerbahood – a remarkable street-art project that delivers the same 21st-century creativity you might expect to find in London, New York or Tokyo, and has come to colour this unheralded enclave on an island that's home to just 184,000 people.
Conceived in 2014, Djerbahood, as it's become known, was the brainwave of a Parisian gallerist who invited a coalition of artists to travel to Djerba to craft a series of images on Erriadh's blank walls. The concept has now blossomed into something much greater – a maze of back-lane houses and facades providing a canvas for more than 250 murals. Some of them are obtuse; impenetrable patterns and shapes. Others are more direct in their aims; elegant visions of soft-eyed women; sprawling depictions of African wildlife in motion. Each of them adds to a global rainbow, and their authors include Egyptian street-art star Aya Tarek, US painter Logan Hicks, Tunisian muralist Mohamed Tbib (who uses the pseudonym 'Inkman'), and the French-Tunisian calligraphist Faouzi Khlifi (known professionally as 'eL Seed').
Back on the north coast in Houmt Souk, El Fondouk is another artful regeneration – a caravanserai (a travellers' inn traditionally found in North Africa and the Islamic world) transformed into a gourmet restaurant. The owner, French expat Laure Jeanne Moreaux, is happy to show me around the property, which she began converting in 2020, pointing out sepia photos of camels tethered in the courtyard where tables now sit. She is a globetrotter, having lived and worked in Madeira and Bangkok, and her wanderlust infuses a delightful French-Tunisian menu. The mixed fish curry, for example, would be a classic bouillabaisse but for the local spices that offer a palate-warming kick.
She herself is an island on an island whose capital delivers the Tunisian template in alluring fashion. Beyond the restaurant, Houmt Souk unravels into the nest of covered passages and shops to which its name (loosely, 'the market neighbourhood') alludes. Aromas of cinnamon and cardamom perfume the air, bright fabrics hang in doorways, and the requests to come inside – to look more closely – are regular but not unduly insistent.
I stumble out of the labyrinth onto the waterfront and the steps of the town's long-time watchdog. The most commonly used description, 'the Spanish Fort', rather underplays the history of a defensive bastion which was built in 1289 – on the site of a Roman stronghold – by Aragonese-Sicilian soldier Roger de Loria, then expanded and bolstered by various sultans and Ottoman governors. Frankly, it still looks like a force to be reckoned with.
Nor do such semantics diminish the view from its ramparts, the sea agleam in the glow of the golden hour. It is not quite the tableau recounted in The Odyssey – where some of his men are so enamoured with their surroundings that an increasingly irritated Odysseus speaks of having to 'force them back to the ships… though they wept bitterly'. But there is every chance that, once you've discovered Djerba, you will be more than happy to stay.
A galaxy not so far away: visiting the mainland from Djerba
One of the unappreciated side-effects of Djerba's location is the access it provides to southern Tunisia. An island it may be, but it is connected to the mainland by the Roman Road – a five-mile causeway whose ingenuity, as its name hints, dates to the Roman era.
This can make for excursions into a landscape of parched majesty, crowned by Berber towns and villages where rock-carved homes cling to steep hillsides – or, in many cases, are dug deep into them. Toujane, Chenini and Tataouine are spectacular cases in point; busy kernels of desert life where, but for the satellite dishes and the mobile phones amid the donkeys and dust, daily existence looks as if it has gone unchanged for centuries.
The latter is a clue (although those familiar with the word 'Tataouine' rarely need it) that the region is tightly tied to the Star Wars franchise. Twenty miles north of the town, the village of Ksar Hadada boasts a 19th-century Berber granary store whose low-slung chambers played a key role in 1999's The Phantom Menace. It now operates as a hotel (£35 per night).
Similarly, but rather more famously, Hotel Sidi Idriss (00216 75 240 005; £50 per night), 60 miles to the north-west in Matmata, shone on screen as the home of Luke Skywalker in the original movie (1977) – and is preserved as something of a shrine.
Tourists can book escorted trips to the Tunisian mainland from Djerba via easyJet. A one-day tour to Tataouine and Chenini starts from £58 a head.
Essentials
EasyJet flies to Djerba from Luton and Manchester from £86 return. A seven-night stay at the five-star Radisson Blu Palace Resort & Thallaso (00216 75 757 600), flying from Luton on April 22, starts at £562 per person with EasyJet Holidays (0330 551 5165). See Discover Tunisia for more information.