With its quaint maze of alleyways lined by picturesque whitewashed houses and shops selling colorful ceramics, the Old Town district of Houmt Souk (Djerba's main town) was made for strolling.
A number of well-preserved fondouks (caravanserais) can be seen amid Houmt Souk's alleyways.
These merchant inns combined sleeping quarters, animal stabling, and warehouse storage for the many traveling merchants who traversed North Africa, buying up salt, spices, and textiles to take back to Europe. Their typical structure usually took the shape of a series of rooms, several stories high, built around an arcaded courtyard.
Today, many of the fondouks in Houmt Souk now function as boutique hotels or restaurants and have been painstakingly restored.
For many visitors, this is one of the best places to visit for shopping on the island. The displays of traditional handicrafts in the souk streets here include Berber jewelry, textiles, traditional shoes, brass and silverware, leather goods, and piles upon piles of hand-painted pottery. It's a shopaholic's dream that few resist.
When haggling is done for the day, head to the tiny harbor, complete with pastel-colored boats bobbing on the Mediterranean, to capture a sense of Houmt Souk's fishing village past.
