Mahdia medina sea-view house

Mahdia sits on a narrow finger of rock pushing into the Mediterranean halfway down Tunisia's eastern coast, and it is the rare Tunisian beach town that never went fully touristic. The old medina occupies the peninsula itself: a compact grid of whitewashed houses with cobalt doors, a sixteenth-century Ottoman fort at the tip, a working fishing harbour on one side and a series of shallow swimming coves on the other. This three-bedroom, 120 square-metre house sits three lanes back from the water on the medina's quieter northern side.

The house follows the classic Tunisian dar layout: rooms arranged around a small tiled internal courtyard that keeps the interior cool through summer, with a staircase up to a flat roof terrace that looks out over the tiled rooftops to the sea. The ground floor holds a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom; the two upper bedrooms open onto the courtyard gallery, with the third arranged as a study or guest room. Original features include hand-painted ceramic tilework, carved plaster niches, thick lime-rendered walls and heavy studded timber doors. It has been rewired and re-plumbed, mains water and electricity are connected, and split-system air conditioning has been fitted in the bedrooms.

Foreign nationals can buy built property in Tunisia with the approval of the regional governorate, a routine step for a house inside an urban area that a local notaire handles as part of the standard purchase file. Prices in Mahdia remain a fraction of anywhere comparable in Europe, and the weak dinar makes the arithmetic even friendlier for buyers holding euros or dollars. Running costs are very low: municipal taxes on a house like this run to a few hundred dinars a year.

Daily life is genuinely walkable. The Friday souk fills the streets outside the Skifa el-Kahla gate with produce, fabric and household goods. The fishing port lands octopus, sardine and sea bream each morning, and a line of small restaurants along the harbour grills the catch for the price of a coffee in Europe. There are bakeries, pharmacies, a supermarket and a hospital within the town, plus the long sandy hotel beach north of the peninsula for when you want proper swimming water and beach clubs.

The swimming coves closest to the house are pale rock shelves dropping into clear turquoise water — excellent for snorkelling, less so for sunbathing. Five minutes north the coast turns into fine golden sand backed by pines and runs uninterrupted for kilometres. Mahdia is on the Sahel railway line with direct trains to Sousse and Monastir, and Monastir Habib Bourguiba airport is fifty minutes away with seasonal flights across Europe.