Tabarka and the North Coast

Most people picture Tunisia as desert and white coastal towns, which makes the far northwest a surprise: the Kroumirie hills here are covered in cork oak forest, green and often misty, and they run down to a rocky coast of small bays and offshore stacks. Tabarka sits below a Genoese fort on an island now joined to the shore, and its particular claim is coral, harvested here for centuries and worked into jewellery, with diving on rocky reefs and through arches and caves that is the best in the country. Needles of rock called Les Aiguilles stand out of the sea beside the town. Inland, Ain Draham is a hill town of pitched roofs among the cork oaks where it occasionally snows, and the whole region is known for wild boar, mushrooms and a jazz festival that has run in Tabarka since the 1970s.

What you actually see

• The Genoese fort - the island fortress above the town and harbour.
• Les Aiguilles - the needles of rock standing out of the sea by the shore.
• Coral diving - rocky reefs, arches and caves, the best diving in Tunisia.
• The Kroumirie forests - cork oak hills and the hill town of Ain Draham inland.

When to go

May to October is warm and best for the sea and diving; the jazz festival falls in the summer. Winter here is genuinely wet and cool, quite unlike the rest of the country, and the forests are at their greenest then. The coast is much quieter than the eastern resorts year-round.

Honest expectations

It is a long way from the main tourist circuit, three hours from Tunis, and infrastructure is modest, with a few hotels rather than a resort strip. The weather is the wettest in Tunisia, so a beach holiday here is less of a certainty than on the east coast. Coral harvesting has depleted the reefs over the centuries, so the diving is about topography and fish as much as coral.

Nearby

Bulla Regia is an hour inland; Bizerte and the northern lakes lie east along the coast.