International Festival of the Sahara

Held each December in Douz, an oasis town home to over 500,000 palm trees known as the 'gateway to the Sahara', the International Festival of the Sahara has run since 1910, when it began under French rule as what locals called the Camel Festival. In 1967, Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia's first president, gave the event its modern form, and it has since grown into the country's oldest and best-known festival, drawing more than 50,000 visitors from across Tunisia and the wider Maghreb each year.

The festival's timing deliberately coincides with the date harvest, when Douz's vast palm groves, producing the prized diglat noor variety, reach the height of their annual yield. Camel marathons, fantasia displays of galloping Arab horses, sloughi hunting dog races and a central Bedouin poetry contest fill four days of celebration, alongside a reenacted traditional Bedouin wedding, all unfolding against the golden dunes at the true edge of the Sahara Desert.

Given the festival began as an actual nomadic Bedouin bridal fair, where desert families gathered to trade goods and arrange marriages for their children, Douz's modern celebration retains a genuine connection to that original purpose even as it has grown into one of North Africa's most significant cultural tourism events — desert life, dates and Bedouin tradition, all converging in the same oasis for one week each winter.