La Goulette
From Tunis, this is the first city stop on the TGM (the Tunis-Goulette-Marsa railway line) enroute to La Marsa, after a ten kilometer-long (six mile-long) crossing of a water. La Goulette is Tunis' trading harbor, from which the ferries leave for the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. This Tunis outpost location assumed a strategic importance in the 16th Century, during the fights between the Ottomans and the Spanish to extend their respective influences on the Mediterranean Sea. The Kasbah Fortress, which unfortunately now is in ruins, stands as a reminder of the storming of La Goulette by Charles Quint. The Ottomans used La Goulette as a prison for the thousands meant to become slaves during the Mediterranean piracy times. Centuries after, during the colonization, the French used also the place as a prison. From the 1950s to the 1970s, La Goulette enjoyed a heyday which is immortalized in the French movie by Ferid Boughdir, Summer in La Goulette. People remember those times as a little Mediterranean paradise where Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Sicilian immigrants lived together and made a triumphal welcome to Habib Bourguiba when he came back from France in 1955. La Goulette features a long popular beach and basic white-and-blue houses and is of little interest for the tourists. However Tunis city dwellers used to come to La Goulette to enjoy one of its good seafood restaurants which have built the reputation of the main drag, the Franklin Roosevelt Avenue.