[1] The Medina contains some 700 monuments, including palaces, mosques, mausoleums, madrasas and fountains dating from the Almohad and the Hafsid periods.

Under Almohad rule, Tunis became the capital of Ifriqiya,[5] and under the Hafsid period it developed into a religious, intellectual and economic center.

The complex organization of the urban fabric fueled an entire colonial literature of the dangerous Medina, anarchic and chaotic, and the territory of ambush.

However, since the 1930s, with the arrival of the first ethnologists, studies have revealed that the articulation of the Medina areas is not random, and houses are built according to clear sociocultural norms, codified according to complex types of human relationships.

The concept of public space is ambiguous in the Medina where the streets are considered as the extension of houses and subject to social tags.

The roof terraces of the Medina are also an important place for social life, as illustrated by the film Halfaouine by Férid Boughedir.

In 1655, he had Ottoman architects build the Hammouda Pacha Mosque in the Turkish style, with an elegant octagonal minaret, below which he constructed his family mausoleum.

[9] His son Murad II Bey (1666–1675) built the Mouradia Madrasah, dedicated to the Maliki school of Islamic law.

The Husainid ruler Ali II ibn Hussein (1759–1782) had the Tourbet el Bey constructed in the south of the Medina as a mausoleum for his family,[11][12] It is the largest funerary monument in Tunis.

It was also for a long time an important place of culture and knowledge, acting as home to the Zitouna University until the independence of Tunisia.

The Ksar Mosque of the Hanafi rite, located opposite the Dar Hussein (Bab Menara), was built in the 12th century under the Khurasanid dynasty.

In 2022, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report included it in the list of African cultural sites which would be threatened by flooding and coastal erosion by the end of the century, but only if climate change followed RCP 8.5, which is the scenario of high and continually increasing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the warming of over 4 °C.,[16] and is no longer considered very likely.