In 2023 UNESCO added Djerba to its World Heritage list under a title that sounds more like a university thesis than a holiday island: Djerba, Testimony to a Settlement Pattern in an Island Territory. What it means in practice is that the island has kept the way people have lived on it for centuries. Instead of one big town, families lived in scattered farms called menzels, each surrounded by its own fields, and villages grew around mosques, markets and cisterns. Rain is scarce here, so water was collected from the roofs and stored in underground tanks, and the layout of the land reflects that.
Riding through the area near Midoun, the largest town in the east, you see it clearly. Low whitewashed houses with flat or domed roofs stand in the middle of plots lined with palms and olives, joined by sandy lanes, and every few kilometres a small mosque appears with its domes and thick, buttressed walls. The island is almost flat, so the only landmark is the horizon, and the sea is never far. For all that it is not boring, because the details change constantly, from the colour of doors to the style of the walls.
The tarmac is mostly decent, but side roads can be sandy at the edges, so take care on corners, and watch for loose gravel where farm tracks meet the road. Wind blows steadily across the island, and in the afternoon it picks up. Mornings are best, with soft light and few other vehicles. Tourist traffic builds up near the resort strip along the east coast, where large hotels line the beach, but a few kilometres inland everything is quiet.
Midoun, two kilometres away, has about thirty thousand inhabitants and a good selection of cafes, small restaurants and petrol stations, and holds a lively weekly market. The island is joined to the mainland by a Roman causeway, still in use as a road at El Kantara, and Homer is said to have set the land of the lotus-eaters here, a charming idea for a place where nobody seems in a hurry. Plan for spring or autumn, with March to May and October to November the most comfortable.