"What's not to like?" a Sfax Travel Page by TheLongTone

I wouldn't go as far as Ronald Firbank and call Sfax the mostt beautiful city in the world, but as far as the center goes I thought it most attractive. The suburbs may be ugly and it may be surrounded by industry but show me a major city anywhere in the world of which this is not true.
Essentially the centre consists of the medina, secure inside it's immaculately restored walls, and a fairly small French new town occupying the area between the medina and the sea.
The medina is fairly compact and easily navigable without too much fear of getting lost, and is both bustling with life and, in sharp contrast to Tunis, almost devoid of shops selling tourist knicknacks. What it does have in unnatural abundance is shoe shops: the main street leading up towards the Great Mosque from Bab al Diwan is almost entirely devoted to them. Not because the people of Sfax are avid shoe consumers but because Sfax is the centre of the Tunisian shoe industry: most of the shops are in fact more like wholesale showrooms.

Exterior wall of the great mosque.