Tunisia which continent

Tunisia's name is derived from its capital city, Tunis, which is located on its northeast coast. Geographically, Tunisia contains the eastern end of the Atlas Mountain, and the northern reaches of the Sahara desert. Much of the rest of the country's land is fertile soil. Its 1, kilometers miles of coastline include the African conjunction of the western and eastern parts of the Mediterranen Basin and, by means of the Sicilian Straiot and Sardinian Channel, feature the African mainland's second and third nearest points to Europe after Gibraltar.

Tunisia is a unitary semi-prresedential representative democratic republic. It is considered to be the only fully democratic sovereign state in the Arab World It has a high human develepment index. Close relations with Europe, in particular with France and with Italy , have been forged through economic cooperation, p rivatization and industrial modernization.

Growth picked up to 2. On the demand side, growth in was driven by a resurgence of exports and investment, while private consumption contracted. As we go further south, there is a series of depressions called chott. Many intermittent rivers flowing through the country end up in these chotts.

Most of the southern part of the country is a sandy desert and much of it is part of the Sahara Desert's Sand Sea, also called the Grand Erg Oriental. Most of the wadis here remain dry all year round and hence, access to water is a major concern here. Tunisia also has several islands.

The Djerba Island marked on the map above is North Africa's largest island. Mount Chambi 1, M is the highest point in the country. At 17 m below sea level, Chott el Djerid is Tunisia's lowest point.

Tunisia has 24 major administrative divisions called governorates. The governorates are further subdivided into districts called mutamadiyat which are further divided into smaller administrative divisions called shaykhats or municipalities and imadats or sectors.

Tataouine is Tunisia's largest governorate by area and Tunis is the largest one by population but the smallest by area.

Though it is relatively small in size, Tunisia has great environmental diversity due to its north-south extent. Its east-west extent is limited. Differences in Tunisia, like the rest of the Maghreb, are largely north-south environmental differences defined by sharply decreasing rainfall southward from any point. The Dorsal, the eastern extension of the Atlas Mountains, runs across Tunisia in a northeasterly direction from the Algerian border in the west to the Cape Bon peninsula in the east.

North of the Dorsal is the Tell, a region characterized by low, rolling hills and plains, again an extension of mountains to the west in Algeria. In the Khroumerie, the northwestern corner of the Tunisian Tell, elevations reach 1, metres 3, ft and snow occurs in winter. The Sahel, a broadening coastal plain along Tunisia's eastern Mediterranean coast, is among the world's premier areas of olive cultivation.

Inland from the Sahel, between the Dorsal and a range of hills south of Gafsa, are the Steppes. Much of the southern region is semi-arid and desert. Tunisia has a coastline 1, kilometres mi long. In maritime terms, the country claims a contiguous zone of 24 nautical miles Tunisia's climate is temperate in the north, with mild rainy winters and hot, dry summers.

The south of the country is desert. The terrain in the north is mountainous, which, moving south, gives way to a hot, dry central plain. The south is semiarid, and merges into the Sahara.

A series of salt lakes, known as chotts or shatts , lie in an east-west line at the northern edge of the Sahara, extending from the Gulf of Gabes into Algeria. The lowest point is Shatt al Gharsah, at 17 metres 56 ft below sea level and the highest is Jebel ech Chambi, at 1, metres 5, ft. Tunisian Arabic, like other Maghrebi dialects, has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates.

There is also a long-established Jewish community in the country, the history of the Jews in Tunisia going back some 2, years. In the Jewish population was an estimated ,, but by only about 1, remained. The first people known to history in what is now Tunisia were the Berbers.

There was a continuing inflow of nomadic Arab tribes from Arabia. According to Matthew Carr, "As many as eighty thousand Moriscos settled in Tunisia, most of them in and around the capital, Tunis, which still contains a quarter known as Zuqaq al-Andalus, or Andalusia Alley.

Tunisia's health system is effective; life expectancy at birth in was The constitution declares Islam as the official state religion and requires the President to be Muslim. Aside from the president, Tunisians enjoy a significant degree of religious freedom, a right enshrined and protected in its constitution, which guarantees the freedom to practice one's religion.

The country has a secular culture that encourages acceptance of other religions and religious freedom. With regards to the freedom of Muslims, the Tunisian government has restricted the wearing of Islamic head scarves hijab in government offices and it discourages women from wearing them on public streets and public gatherings.

The government believes the hijab is a "garment of foreign origin having a partisan connotation". There were reports that the Tunisian police harassed men with "Islamic" appearance such as those with beards , detained them, and sometimes compelled men to shave their beards off.

In , the former Tunisian president declared that he would "fight" the hijab, which he refers to as "ethnic clothing". Individual Tunisians are tolerant of religious freedom and generally do not inquire about a person's personal beliefs.

The bulk of Tunisians belong to the Maliki School of Sunni Islam and their mosques are easily recognizable by square minarets.

However, the Turks brought with them the teaching of the Hanafi School during the Ottoman rule which still survives among the Turkish descended families today, their mosques traditionally have octagonal minarets. Tunisia has a sizable Christian community of around 25, adherents, mainly Catholics 22, and to a lesser degree Protestants. Berber Christians continued to live in Tunisia up until the early 15th century. Judaism is the country's third largest religion with 1, members.

One-third of the Jewish population lives in and around the capital. The remainder lives on the island of Djerba, with 39 synagogues, and where the Jewish community dates back 2, years. Many Jews consider it a pilgrimage site, with celebrations taking place there once every year. In fact, Tunisia along with Morocco has been said to be the Arab countries most accepting of their Jewish populations. Arabic is the official language, and Tunisian Arabic, known as Derja, is the local, vernacular variety of Arabic and is used by the public.

There is also a small minority of speakers of Shelha, a Berber language. Due to the former French occupation, French also plays a major role in the country, despite having no official status. It is widely used in education e. Most Tunisians are able to speak it. Due to Tunisia's proximity to Italy and the large number of Italian Tunisians, Italian is understood and spoken by a small part of the Tunisian population.

A basic education for children between the ages of 6 and 16 has been compulsory since Tunisia ranked 17th in the category of "quality of the [higher] educational system" and 21st in the category of "quality of primary education" in The Global Competitiveness Report , released by The World Economic Forum. While children generally acquire Tunisian Arabic at home, when they enter school at age 6, they are taught to read and write in Standard Arabic. From the age of 8, they are taught French while English is introduced at the age of The culture of Tunisia is mixed due to their long established history of conquerors such as Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, and the French who all left their mark on the country.

In practice, no public criticism of the Ben Ali regime was tolerated and all direct protest was severely suppressed and did not get reported in the local media. Football is the most popular sport in Tunisia.

The team's record in the World Cup is shown below:. The premier football league is the "Tunisian Ligue Professionnelle 1". The latter team participated in the World Cup for clubs and reached the semi-final match, in which it was eliminated by Boca Juniors from Argentina. The Tunisia national handball team has participated in several handball world championships. In , Tunisia came fourth. The national league consists of about 12 teams, with ES.

Sahel and Esperance S. Tunis dominating. The most famous Tunisian handball player is Wissem Hmam. In the Handball Championship in Tunis, Wissem Hmam was ranked as the top scorer of the tournament.

The Tunisian national handball team won the African Cup eight times, being the team dominating this competition. The Tunisians won the African Cup in Egypt by defeating the host country. In boxing, Victor Perez "Young" was world champion in the flyweight weight class in and This entry has been automagically sourced from Wikipedia, the user-contributed encyclopedia.

Visit Tunisia on Wikipedia to correct or update this entry. Reserve Tickets. Plan Your Visit. Getting Here. Upcoming Programs. During the late nineteenth century as the European colonial powers spread through Africa and decided among themselves who would control which African territories, Tunisia fell to the French, who marked the consolidation of their efforts to control Tunisia with a treaty forced upon the local authorities on May 12, making Tunisia a French protectorate—essentially, a colony of France.

Strong Tunisian resistance to domination by the French was apparent throughout the 75 years of French colonization. The anti-colonial struggle heightened with the founding of the Destour party in and was re-energized by the neo-Destour Party, founded in As the countries of Africa began to declare and win their independence from the European colonizers during the post-World War II period, Tunisia was one of the first to declare independence. On March 20, , Tunisia became independent of France, and one year later, on July 25, , the country proclaimed itself a republic and Habib Bourguiba the first President.

Tunisia's first republican constitution was adopted nearly two years later, on June 1, Four years afterward on October 15, , the French evacuated the northern coastal city of Bizerte, the last foreign military base in Tunisia. Bourguiba remained President until November 7, , when in a constitutional change Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali succeeded him in office, Bourguiba having been declared senile by several doctors and thus incompetent to continue to serve.

Ben Ali was invested as President of the Republic on November 7, , by the Tunisian parliament to serve out the rest of former President Bourguiba's term; Bourguiba quietly retired, taking up residence in his home city of Monastir on the eastern Mediterranean coast for the next eleven years until his natural death in the year April 2, , marked the first legislative and presidential elections under Ben Ali, during which the Head of State was officially elected President by the Tunisian electorate.

Social Conditions: Much of Tunisia's relatively small population of 9. The western mountain region is somewhat more sparsely populated, and even fewer Tunisians live in the southern half of the country where the Sahara desert begins, although even in the desert south settlements and towns have flourished for centuries.

Approximately 65 percent of Tunisia's population lived in urban areas in With a population density of only 60 persons per square kilometer, Tunisia has made significant progress in overcoming the challenge of educating a rural population that has included sufficient numbers of nomadic herders and small farmers scattered throughout the countryside to have made the building of accessible schools genuinely problematic.

By approximately two-thirds of Tunisians age 15 and older were literate able to read and write — Literacy since that time has continued to increase. In , approximately 80 percent of Tunisian males and almost 60 percent of Tunisian females ages 15 and up were literate.