Hammamet Beach

Hammamet is on the Cap Bon peninsula, an hour south of Tunis, with a fifteenth-century medina standing directly on the shore and a long sand beach running away from it in both directions.

It became a resort through a specific accident. A Romanian millionaire, Georges Sebastian, built a villa here in the 1920s that Frank Lloyd Wright called the most beautiful house he knew; artists and writers followed through the 1930s, and by the 1960s Tunisia had built the country's first purpose-planned tourist zone alongside it. The villa is now an international cultural centre and the town is Tunisia's oldest resort.

The beach is fine golden sand on a sheltered bay, shallow and warm, with a very gradual entry and almost no swell. It is genuinely good family swimming water. Yasmine Hammamet, a purpose-built marina and hotel zone south of the old town, was added in the 2000s and is a separate proposition — larger, newer and with a replica medina that visitors should not confuse with the real one a few kilometres north. The medina's walls run down to the water and the fishing harbour beside them still works, which is unusual for a resort of this age.

Development is dense but low, with orange groves and cypress still visible between the hotels, and a rule dating from the 1960s limiting building height to the palm line — which is why Hammamet does not look like the Spanish coast of the same era. Nabeul, twenty minutes north, is the working pottery town with the market, and Kelibia at the tip of Cap Bon has a Byzantine fortress above an emptier beach.

A fifteenth-century medina standing on the sand, a bay shallow and warm enough to be among the better family swimming in the Mediterranean, and a building height limit from the 1960s that is why this does not look like the Spanish coast of the same decade. Do not confuse the old town with Yasmine's replica of it a few kilometres south.