Bardo National Museum

How to visit without wasting the trip

The mistake here isn’t turning up without a ticket — you pay around 13 TND (about £3.30) at the door, in cash, and there’s no real advance online booking to chase. The mistake is building a whole Tunis day around the Bardo without checking it’s actually open that week. Access has been on-and-off since the 2015 attack and the long renovation that followed, so confirm it’s running for your dates before you commit, rather than rolling up to a shuttered palace. Bring small dinar notes and a little extra for the photo permit; cards don’t work at the desk.

When it is open, treat the timing like a queue you’re beating even though there’s no queue. Get there for the 09:30 opening and go straight upstairs to the Roman-mosaic galleries — the El Jem and Dougga floors lifted whole and hung like paintings — before the mid-morning Carthage and El Jem coach tours land and fill the rooms. It’s closed Mondays, so don’t waste a precious day on it.

Do the mosaics justify the trip out?

Take the TGM light railway from Tunis Marine and a short taxi to the door rather than trying to walk it from the medina; allow two to three hours inside plus the run out and back. The first hour after opening is the calm one; late afternoon in summer, when it stays open to around 19:00, is the quieter alternative if a morning’s gone on Carthage.

For about three pounds this is the best-value indoor hour or two in Tunis, and the world’s finest Roman mosaics genuinely earn the trip if antiquity interests you at all. Pair it with the medina the same morning and save Carthage and Sidi Bou Saïd for a separate day on the TGM — stacking all four into one day is how people end up rushing the thing they came for.