Borj el-Kebir

Squat Ottoman fortress on the Houmt Souk waterfront, built on Roman foundations

The Borj el-Kebir sits on the northern waterfront of Houmt Souk, a squat and solid fortress that has been rebuilt and expanded by successive rulers — Aragonese, Hafsid, and finally Ottoman — since the twelfth century. The current structure is largely Ottoman from the late sixteenth century, built on older foundations, and it retains the chunky, functional appearance of a working military fort rather than a decorative one.

It is worth an hour of your time. The interior is largely bare, but the views from the walls over the harbour and across the water are good, and the scale of the place — its thick walls, the small courtyard, the fishing boats visible through the battlements — gives a decent sense of the strategic value Jerba held throughout the medieval Mediterranean. The fishing port immediately below is still active and makes for good late-afternoon people-watching.

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A story
The tower outside the fortress walls commemorates a grim episode: in 1560, a Spanish fleet sent to attack Ottoman Tripolitana was decisively defeated by the Ottoman admiral Turgut Reis (Dragut) near Jerba. The skulls of roughly 5,000 Spanish soldiers were piled into a pyramid on this spot — the "Tower of Skulls" — that stood until the nineteenth century, when a French diplomat finally had it demolished. The bones were eventually interred in a nearby Christian cemetery.

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