São Paulo – Tunisia received 5,761,657 tourists from January to December 20 last year, up 25.3% from 2011, according to the National Office of Tunisian Tourism (ONTT, in the French acronym). Revenues from foreign visitors amounted to 3.07 billion dinars (nearly US$ 2 billion), up 30% using the same basis of comparison, according to the Central Bank of Tunisia. The information was supplied by new agency Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP).
The increase took lace in comparison with relatively low figures, because tourism suffered a hard blow in 2011 with the Arab Spring. The country staged popular uprisings that led to the downfall of Zine El Abdine Ben Ali’s administration. Ben Ali had been in power for over two decades. Political and social instability caused foreigner visits to drop.
To that end, performance last year was still below that of 2010. The total number of visitors was 14.2% lower, according to the TAP.
Europeans were the absolute majority among tourists who travelled to the North African country from January to December 20 last year. There were 2.9 million European visitors, up nearly 40% from 2011. This was in spite of the economic crisis underway in Europe.
The second main source of visitors is the Maghreb, a region which comprises Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Mauritania, as well as Tunisia itself. The country received 2.7 million tourists from the region, up 20.6% from the preceding year. There was also a 27.2% increase in the number of tourists from the United States, up to nearly 28,000.
On the other hand, the number of visitors from the Middle East, Africa and China dropped.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
