Mountain peak · La Marsa

Jebel el Khaoui

AT A GLANCE

Why go?

Jebel el Khaoui is a small, tree-covered rise on the northern edge of Tunis, sitting between the beach suburbs of La Marsa and Gammarth. It is not a mountain in any dramatic sense – the summit barely clears 80 metres – but it carries one of the most evocative names in the area: local scholars gloss the toponym as "the hollow mountain", because the slopes are riddled with rock-cut tombs.↗↗↗

What makes the climb worthwhile is the unlikely combination it offers in a few quiet minutes of walking: a thin ribbon of Mediterranean woodland surviving inside a dense residential district, a two-thousand-year-old burial ground carved straight into the hillside, and a lookout over the Gulf of Tunis that puts Carthage, Sidi Bou Said and the city skyline into a single sweep. It is a local green space rather than a ticketed attraction, and that understated character is exactly its charm – a place to stretch your legs between swims and lunches on the La Marsa corniche.↗↗

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Mountain peak · La Marsa

Jebel el Khaoui

La Marsa, TN 4.5 (12 Google reviews)

Photo: Google Maps

AT A GLANCE

Why go?

Jebel el Khaoui is a small, tree-covered rise on the northern edge of Tunis, sitting between the beach suburbs of La Marsa and Gammarth. It is not a mountain in any dramatic sense – the summit barely clears 80 metres – but it carries one of the most evocative names in the area: local scholars gloss the toponym as "the hollow mountain", because the slopes are riddled with rock-cut tombs.↗↗↗

What makes the climb worthwhile is the unlikely combination it offers in a few quiet minutes of walking: a thin ribbon of Mediterranean woodland surviving inside a dense residential district, a two-thousand-year-old burial ground carved straight into the hillside, and a lookout over the Gulf of Tunis that puts Carthage, Sidi Bou Said and the city skyline into a single sweep. It is a local green space rather than a ticketed attraction, and that understated character is exactly its charm – a place to stretch your legs between swims and lunches on the La Marsa corniche.↗↗

↗

A name that tells you what to look for

The hill's name points to its most striking physical feature. The slope that overlooks the Gulf of Tunis is honeycombed with cavities, and the burial chambers cut into the rock are traditionally described in Arabic as "damous" – niches hollowed out of stone. Walking the hillside, the holes are the thing to look for: dark rectangular openings in the banks, set into the rock on either side of the paths, half-hidden under maquis and pine.↗

The rise has been mapped under several spellings – Djebel el Khaoui, Djebel el Kraoui, El Kraoui, Jabal al Khawi – which is why searching in French-language material sometimes leads to a different set of results than searching in Arabic or English. Same hill, same coordinates, just generations of cartographers trying to write down one local name.↗↗

The necropolis in the hillside

The hollows are not natural. Archaeologists first read the tombs as Punic, which would have made them a modest footnote beside the better-known Carthaginian sites across the bay. But when inscriptions in Hebrew and carved seven-branched candlesticks turned up inside the chambers, the interpretation shifted: this is a Jewish necropolis, and one of the oldest in Tunisia.↗

The tombs are arranged as niches laid out in horizontal rows on two storeys, burrowed into the rock rather than built above it. Walls and ceilings were once coated with lime plaster, and each niche was sealed with a terracotta plaque carrying the name of the deceased and an epitaph. Some researchers have linked the community buried here to Jews who reached Carthage after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, which would push the cemetery back roughly two thousand years – a striking thought for a hill that today has apartment blocks at its feet.↗

Whatever the precise dating, the necropolis is a reminder that the whole shore of the Gulf of Tunis, from Carthage to Gammarth, was an ancient burial landscape in which Punic, Jewish, Latin and Byzantine communities laid their dead side by side. The hillside at Jebel el Khaoui is one of the most legible places to feel that layering without going into a fenced archaeological park.↗

A green lung in the northern suburbs

Today the hill is read above all as the forest of Jebel el Khaoui – a wooded slope that La Marsa's municipality treats as shared public space. In May 2020 the town ran a clean-up of the forest, hauling out construction rubble, old furniture and broken electrical equipment that had been dumped there, while the mayor publicly asked residents to keep the woodland tidy. That episode says a lot about the place: it is a neighbourhood hill that locals actually use, walk through and care about, not a monument behind a fence.↗

Residential districts press up against its lower flanks – Cité El Hana and Cité Ettaieb Elmhiri to the south, the beach-resort quarter of Gammarth just to the north, La Marsa's cafés and corniche to the east. From the top, the modest height still buys a real view over the Gulf of Tunis: the curve of the bay toward the capital, the whitewashed crest of Sidi Bou Said along the coast, and the open sea toward Carthage.↗↗

Another landmark belongs to the same ridge line: the Cimetière militaire de Gammarth, a seven-hectare French military cemetery opened in January 1944 and still maintained by the veterans' service of the French embassy. It sits on these heights and makes a sober, worthwhile second stop for anyone combining the hill with the wartime history of the North African campaign.↗

Making the visit short and worth it

Treat Jebel el Khaoui as a half-hour to hour-long interlude rather than a destination in itself. The summit is reached quickly from the surrounding streets, so the sensible plan is to weave it into a day already spent in this corner of the suburbs: lunch on La Marsa's pine-lined corniche, a swim on the beach, then the cool of the late afternoon up through the forest for the view and the dark openings in the rock. Dusk is the best time, when the light over the bay turns warm and the paths fill with local walkers.↗↗

There is no visitor infrastructure to rely on here: no ticket office, no information board on the necropolis, no museum at the top. What there is, is a public hillside with paths, trees, tombs in the rock and a view. Approach it the way the locals do – quietly, expecting a short pleasant climb – and read up on the burial caves beforehand so you know what you are looking at when the niches appear in the banks.↗↗

What makes it special

01

The name Jebel el Khaoui is glossed locally as "the hollow mountain" – the rock-cut tombs that pock its slope are the reason.↗

02

A roughly 2,000-year-old Jewish necropolis, with Hebrew inscriptions and seven-branched menorahs, is buried in the hillside; researchers first mistook it for Punic.↗

03

The tombs are niches cut into the rock in horizontal rows on two storeys, once lime-plastered and sealed with terracotta plaques bearing the names of the dead.↗

04

A modest 77–86 m rise, but it still earns a wide view over the Gulf of Tunis toward Carthage, Sidi Bou Said and the capital.↗↗

05

The municipal clean-up of 2020 confirms the hill is used as a neighbourhood forest – a green pocket inside the Cité El Hana / Gammarth residential maze.↗↗

A little planning goes a long way

Go late in the day: the climb is short and shade is patchy, so the forest path and the view are most pleasant at golden hour, after the beach crowds have thinned.
Wear proper shoes, not flip-flops. The tombs open out of rocky banks beside the path, and the slope is rough scrub and pine litter, not a paved promenade.
Look down and sideways rather than just up: the dark rectangular openings in the rock face are the point of interest here, and they are easy to miss if you walk straight to the top for the view.↗
Pair it with the surroundings – La Marsa's corniche for a meal, Sidi Bou Said along the coast, the Roman ruins at Carthage, and the Gammarth military cemetery on the heights – so the hill becomes a short stop inside a fuller afternoon.↗↗
Don't expect signs, tickets or a guided explanation of the necropolis. Bring a little background reading with you, and leave any discovered inscriptions and niches exactly as they are – the municipality has been asking visitors and neighbours for that care in plain terms.↗

About this guide

Compiled with AI assistance from the sources below; this is not a first-hand visit. Place details collected October 5, 2026. Hours, access and ratings can change; confirm with the venue before visiting.