Jerba, detached from the continent is an island which kept clean traditions, rites and habits. Island with very strong tourist concentration it remains nevertheless very attached still today to its ancestral way of life and its culture. Agriculture suffers from big problems because the island suffers from the lack of irrigation, reason for which it brings continent the fresh water by underwater drains. Flourishing is on the contrary its textile craft industry which consists primarily in the weaving of wool blankets, in the red clay potteries coming from the village of Guellala, of its silver and gold jewels.

Jerba is an island in the mythical beginnings: Ulysses, coming from Troy would have unloaded there and described the inhabitants like eaters of lotus, fruit to the honey taste of which the effect would be the lapse of memory of all, including his fatherland and of his family. This is why Jerba is praised to be the country of Lotophages.

This legend, brought back by Homère in the Odyssey, already described the enchantment which Jerba got as of Antiquity.

In 587 front J C., the driven out Jews of Jerusalem by Nabuchodonosor settled there. Their descendants constitute an important community still nowadays, proof of the tolerance of Djerbiens and an integration successful out of ground of Islam.

The Jews take place famous of worship there, Ghriba, where each year a pilgrimage is carried out the thirty third day of Jewish Passover. Jerba Roman phenician then, was called antiquement Méninx and was famous for its manufacture of crimson.

As all the Eastern coast of Tunisia it was thereafter vandal, Byzantine and after fights baited between Normands and Arab, it was Islamized.

Nowadays, the Berber population of origin represents the only Moslems in Tunisia of Kharijite observance which is expressed architecturalement through a search for austere forms, essential and elegant.

The houses or "Menzels", all white, reflect, thanks to its vaults, the rays of the sun while ensuring a great freshness inside. The mosques which one finds dispersed inside the island are also of any beauty by their simplicity in their essential structure.