Eles is a small village which lies in the eastern foothills of the Atlas Mountains in northwest Tunisia. It sits over a natural spring at the foot of a small valley with a road north, down the hills to the Makthar - El Kef road which lies a couple of kilometres away. Visitors with a GPS can find the village at 35°56'55"N, 9°5'50"E, but should be wary using local maps to find this reference as these can be marked in Grads rather than Degrees. If you give the maps a miss and use the local road signs, then it would also be helpful to know that they can transliterate the village name as Ellès or Al Las.

If you're in the area it's worth a brief trip for the dolmens which can be found to the east, south and west of the village. It has been suggested by that some of these tombs face towards where Alpha Centauri rises over the local horizon.¹ This may be true, but Michael Hoskin has pointed out that all the tombs also face downhill,² so it's hard to say that this is meaningful.

The tombs are in varying states of decay. In recent years the availability of mechanised equipment has meant that it's become easier to remove megaliths which are taking up useful agricultural land. It's possible that a great many dolmens have been lost on the more extensively farmed east of the village. In contrast the hard rocky valley found to the west is agriculturally useless, and so the tombs there should survive for longer.

The dates of the tombs are uncertain. Suggestions have been between the Neolithic and the Iron Age. The cut of the front of the tombs is similar in style, if not size, to Carthaginian tombs, and local surveys tend to consider the tombs to Protohistoric or Numidian, which translates to around 1000 BC in date.

The local rock strata are geologically interesting as they provide a particularly good record of the K-Pg boundary, which is perhaps better known as the K-T Boundary Extinction Event and better still as the Thing That Killed the Dinosaurs.