The Kasbah

The Kasbah is the massive Ottoman citadel at the north side of the old port — a near-square fortress of high yellow walls, corner bastions, and a heavy gate facing the harbour. The footprint reuses a Byzantine fort built in the sixth century AD on the same headland; the surviving structure is essentially seventeenth-century Ottoman, refaced repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The walled interior contains a small residential quarter — narrow lanes, whitewashed houses, a couple of small mosques — that is more or less continuous with the rest of the medina but enclosed by the walls. The streets are quiet, easy to wander, and full of small architectural details: studded wooden doors, half-buried Roman column drums reused as kerbs, the occasional tile-faced fountain.

The summit walk along the ramparts is open in places and gives the best photographs of the old port from above. The main entrance is from the harbour-front esplanade.

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A story
The Kasbah's high curtain walls — up to 11 metres in places — were rebuilt by the Ottoman governor Mourad Bey in the 1620s to repel Spanish raiding fleets. The Spanish kept coming anyway; they sacked the city repeatedly in the late seventeenth century despite the walls, and Bizerte only stabilised under Husseinid rule a generation later.