Djerba is a cultural landscape that reflects how local people survived and thrived on a harsh desert island. The dossier and the inscription criteria speak of overcoming the unique challenges in finding food and water, building shelters, developing an economy, defending themselves, and so on. This sounds interesting enough, though a bit vague like most cultural landscapes.

However, almost none of the inscribed locations reflect these criteria. Of the 31 locations specifically mentioned, 25 are mosques, along with a catholic church, a synagogue, and a souk. Which honestly makes this inscription baffling.

For our visit, we stayed in Houmt Souk at the north-western edge of the island. We visited the souk (naturally), the central church, and the Sidi Salem mosque just west of the town. For each of these, there isn’t really much to see. The church is only open two hours a week on Thursdays, so unless your timing is perfect you can only see the outside. The Sidi Salem mosque is only open in the afternoons, and from the outside there’s basically nothing to see anyway as it’s just a little walled compound with a dome (see photo). It reminded me of the fortified churches site in Romania, but otherwise unremarkable.

The souk is very small and inauthentic compared to those found other medinas, and since Djerba is very much a tourist town the stalls are mostly selling fridge magnets and counterfeit football jerseys. Although not mentioned in the dossier, there are a few caravanserais in the souk - some of which are heavily restored but very impressive. Two of the best are marked on google maps as “Hotel Marhala” and “El Fondouk restaurant”.

When visiting, make sure you start with the heritage museum in Houmt Souk. The first third of the museum talks about how the original inhabitants survived and thrived, i.e. the precise reasons for inscription! There’s great displays and well-written signage here, so you can actually understand what the site is intended to demonstrate. The museum complex also has a disused mosque, featuring displays and information on  other local mosques. Some of these are among the listed sites, so it's interesting to see a photo and a paragraph of information.

Overall this is a pretty poor inscription. The island is already very popular with domestic tourists and Europeans day-tripping from their resorts. Between this and the scheduled inscription of Sidi Bou Said, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Tunisia is simply trying to inscribe all of their popular tourist sites.

Access:

We travelled to Djerba on a long-distance SNTRI bus from Tunis, which took about 8 hours. SNTRI also have buses available to and from other cities in Tunisia like Sousse and Sfax (we left on a direct bus to El Jem). SNTRI take bookings in advance, however there’s no reserved seating so be prepared for a mad scramble when the bus arrives. There's also a local airport, but we didn't look closely at the options here.