The oasis of Tamerza lies between Mides and Chebika and as in the latter, the villagers have abandoned the old center and replace it with a modern yet impersonal new village. The old village, clinching to the mountainside, looks like a termitarium. An important defensive outpost in Roman times, Tamerza was built on the same site as the earlier settlement of which no trace remains.

In the mountains, the ruins there attest the importance of the village’s strategic past, it was used as a watchtower to guard the road from Gafsa to Tebessa.

Under the Byzantines, Tamerza was the seat of a bishopric. Tamerza stands on a cliff falling sheer to the Sendess River whose unpredictable and violent floods erode from time to time a little more of the cliff on which the village stands. The village’s simple, functional, sober and elegant architecture synthesizes the oasis culture.

 

 

 

 

 

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