Béja's medina is small, lived-in, and undiscovered by tourism. There are no tour groups, no souvenir stalls, no touts — just steep lanes of whitewashed houses, the occasional café, and a working covered market where farmers from the surrounding countryside sell olives, cheese, and dates. The street grid climbs the hillside from the lower town up to the kasbah, and the views over the rooftops to the wheat fields beyond get better with every turn.
The best time to wander is the morning, when the market is busy and the stone underfoot is still cool. Souk al-Atik, the older covered market, sells household goods and some of the local olive oil for which the region is known. The medina is genuinely a working neighbourhood rather than a heritage site, and that is its appeal — this is what a Tunisian provincial town looks like when it is not preserving itself for visitors.