Gabès Seaside Oasis

The oasis of Gabès is the only seaside oasis in the Mediterranean — a band of palm grove and intensive garden running right down to the sand. The combination is genuinely strange and was famous in antiquity. For centuries, freshwater springs surfacing close to the beach allowed gardeners to grow palms, pomegranates, figs, henna, and a dense understorey of vegetables on plots smaller than tennis courts.

You can walk through the oasis in the morning or rent a calèche (horse cart) at the edge of the city. The villages of Chenini Gabès (not to be confused with the Berber village in the south) and Jara sit inside the palm grove and are the prettiest corners of greater Gabès. The threats to the oasis are real and visible — falling water tables, pollution from the phosphate plants, encroaching concrete — and the experience is bittersweet. Come now if you want to see it functioning at all.

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A story
Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, described the oasis of Tacapae — Roman Gabès — as a three-storey garden: tall date palms on top, olive and pomegranate trees in the middle layer, and beneath them barley, vegetables, and herbs. Two thousand years later the same three-storey system was still being practised. The springs that made it possible began to fail in the late 20th century as the modern city pumped groundwater faster than rainfall could replace it.