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Quick Answer — Testour is a small town in the Medjerda valley, about 80 km west of Tunis, founded in the early 1600s by Muslim and Jewish refugees expelled from Spain — and it still looks and feels like the Andalusia they carried with them: tiled roofs, arcaded streets, and a Great Mosque whose minaret bears a clock that runs backwards, the only one of its kind on a mosque anywhere. Come for the mosque, the sleepy Andalusian grid, the memory of singer Habiba Msika, and — in season — the pomegranates the town is famous for. It’s an easy self-drive day from Tunis, classically paired with the Roman city of Dougga twenty minutes up the road.
Every country has towns that history put down in the wrong place, like a book left in another room. Testour is Spain, shelved in the Tunisian wheat country for four hundred years and never reclaimed. The refugees who built it — Moriscos driven out by Philip III’s expulsion edicts of 1609, with Sephardic Jewish families alongside — laid out their new home the only way they knew: an Iberian town plan, sloped red-tile roofs that make no sense under a Tunisian sun, and a mosque whose minaret quietly quotes the church towers of Aragon.
The Great Mosque and the Clock That Runs Backwards
The Great Mosque of Testour, built in the 1630s, is the town’s masterpiece and its riddle. The lower minaret is pure Andalusian brickwork; near the top, octagonal storeys take over in the Ottoman-Tunisian manner — two homelands stacked in one tower. And then there’s the clock: a clock face set into the minaret whose numerals are arranged in reverse and whose hands turn counter-clockwise.
Explanations multiply — nostalgia for a lost homeland, a wish to turn back time itself, a builder’s flourish — and the honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, which is exactly why it works on the imagination. The mosque remains a working house of worship; visits outside prayer times are generally welcomed, dress modestly, and a small tip to the caretaker who unlocks the minaret stairs is customary (verify access arrangements).
A Town of Coexistence — and of Habiba Msika
Testour’s founding story is one of parallel exiles: Muslims and Jews expelled from the same peninsula, building the same town, trading in the same arcades. The old Jewish quarter (hara) and its cemetery survive, and the town remains one of Tunisia’s most legible monuments to a shared Ibero-Maghrebi world.
Its most famous daughter belongs to that mixed inheritance: Habiba Msika, the Jewish-Tunisian singer and stage star of the 1920s whose life — scandalous, glamorous, cut short by her murder in 1930 — still shadows Tunisian popular culture. The annual Testour International Festival of Malouf keeps the town’s Andalusian musical tradition alive each summer, and it’s the one date that fills the hotels of the whole valley (check dates if you’re timing a visit around it).
What Else to See — and Eat
Beyond the Great Mosque: wander the grid of the old town for doorways, tilework, and roofline details you will not find anywhere else in the country; find the smaller Andalusian mosques and the zaouias between them; and buy whatever fruit is in season. Testour’s orchards — pomegranates above all — are the pride of the Medjerda valley, and autumn visits coincide with the harvest. Lunch is farm-town Tunisian: grills, mechouia, seasonal everything. It’s honest rather than refined, and better for it.
Getting There
Testour is the textbook stop on a self-drive loop through the Medjerda valley — most visitors pair it with Dougga, twenty minutes up the road, and the drive through the wheat and olive country is part of the outing.
A car makes the day trivially easy from Tunis; DiscoverCars compares the agencies, and our guide to renting a car in Tunisia has the practicalities. Buses and louages from Tunis’s Bab Saadoun station do reach Testour, but stringing Testour + Dougga together in one day on public transport is a patience project; with a car it’s a leisurely loop with time for lunch and the long way home.
From the Carthage Magazine Bookshelf
Testour is a town built from memory — these three help you read it.
- All About Tunisia — the definitive English-language traveler’s guide. 572 pages, 27 chapters, all nine regions, every UNESCO inscription, five thematic trails — and the practical answers (visa, currency, transport, etiquette) most travelers wish they’d had on the plane. $24.99 · PDF & EPUB
- Speak Like a Local — 200+ Tunisian Arabic phrases with native audio recorded in Tunis. The phrases for the taxi, the souk, the café, and the dinner table. $14.99 · PDF, EPUB, MP3
- The Authentic Tunisian Cookbook — sixty traditional recipes from the heart of North Africa. For when you get home and find yourself missing the food. $9.99 · PDF & EPUB
All three available as a bundle for $39.99 — guide, language, and food, delivered together.
