Tunis Beats the Heat Better Than Most—But Not by Much

Temperatures in central Tunis hit 43 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, the third consecutive day above 40, pushing the city's emergency health services to activate their Plan Canicule protocols for the first time since 2023. The Interior Ministry confirmed that seven people had been hospitalised for heat-related illness in the 48 hours to Thursday morning, all of them elderly residents from low-income districts on the northern periphery of the capital.

The timing matters. France recorded more than 2,000 excess deaths at the peak of its own heatwave this week, and extreme heat is now killing people across the Mediterranean basin faster than governments can update their response plans. Tunis sits in that same climatic corridor. What separates a city that weathers a heat emergency from one that buries its citizens is largely a question of what was built, funded, and organised before the temperatures spiked—and on that score, the Tunisian capital presents a genuinely mixed picture.

Where the City Is Holding Up

The Municipality of Tunis opened twelve designated cooling centres across the city on Tuesday, including spaces at the Bibliothèque Nationale on Boulevard Bab Bnet, the Palais des Congrès near Lac de Tunis, and several maisons de culture in inner-city districts. The national utility STEG confirmed that it had not imposed rolling blackouts despite peak demand on Wednesday afternoon reaching an estimated 4,100 megawatts nationally—a figure that strained but did not break the grid. That stands in contrast to Algiers, where residential blackouts lasting three to four hours were reported this week in outer communes, and to Cairo, where load-shedding has been a persistent summer fixture since 2023.

The Médina, Tunis's UNESCO-listed old city, benefits from something no engineer can replicate quickly: centuries-old stone construction and narrow street geometry that keeps ground-floor temperatures measurably lower than in the concrete suburbs. Residents of Rue Sidi ben Arous and the surrounding souks reported ambient temperatures roughly five to six degrees cooler than open-air readings taken on Avenue Habib Bourguiba less than one kilometre away. Urban planners at the Institut National de la Cartographie et de la Télédétection have been documenting this heat-island differential since at least 2021, and their data is finally influencing the city's tree-planting and pavement-coating policies for new development zones.

Where the Gaps Show

The picture looks considerably worse in Ettadhamen and Hay Hlel, dense working-class communes on the western edge of greater Tunis where flat-roofed concrete housing absorbs and re-radiates heat through the night. Residents there told local radio station Mosaïque FM this week that water pressure had dropped significantly during afternoon hours, hampering even basic cooling efforts. The national water utility SONEDE acknowledged pressure management measures were in effect in four governorates, though it stopped short of declaring a shortage.

Compare that to Casablanca, which launched a neighbourhood-level cooling ambassador programme in 2024, deploying trained volunteers to door-knock on vulnerable households during red-alert days. Madrid has operated a similar scheme—its Plan de Vigilancia por Calor—since 2021. Tunis has the emergency hotline 190 and the cooling centres, but no equivalent street-level outreach network. The gap between infrastructure and human logistics is where cities tend to lose people in a sustained heat event.

The national health ministry says it will convene a post-event review no later than July 20 to assess hospital admissions and identify which districts were underserved. For residents living through the heat right now, the most useful immediate steps are practical: the cooling centres at cultural institutions are free and open until 10 p.m., the SNTRI bus service is running additional afternoon circuits on lines serving Ettadhamen and El Ouardia, and SONEDE is urging non-essential water use to be shifted to before 7 a.m. or after 8 p.m. A slight break in temperatures is forecast by the national meteorological agency INM for Sunday, when readings should fall to around 36 degrees. Until then, the city is coping—just about.