Tunisia was proposed in the 1920’s, by Albert Hermann, as holding the location of Plato’s Atlantis, at a dried up saltwater lake known today as Shott el Djerid and was, according to Hermann, previously called Lake Tritonis. Around this same period Dr Paul Borchardt, a German geologist, also favoured a site near the Gulf of Gabés, off Tunisia, as the location of Atlantis.

More recently Alberto Arecchi has developed a theory that places Atlantis off the present Tunisian coast with a large inland sea, that he identifies as the original Atlantic Sea, straddling what is now the Tunisian Algerian border. Arecchi claims that this was nearly entirely emptied into the Mediterranean as a result of seismic or tectonic activity in the distant past.