The main door of the mausoleum is carved from teak and inscribed in Arabic with three titles: "the supreme fighter, builder of modern Tunisia, liberator of women." The last epithet is not mere flattery. Bourguiba's reforms after independence in 1956 were genuinely radical for the Arab world. He abolished polygamy, established civil marriage, gave women the right to divorce, and mandated girls' education. He banned the wearing of the hijab in public institutions. These changes made him a polarizing figure across the region, revered in Tunisia and denounced by more conservative neighbors. The mausoleum's inscriptions declare, in permanent script, how Bourguiba wanted history to remember him.

The building sits at the western end of the Sidi El Mezeri cemetery, Monastir's main burial ground, at the terminus of a wide ceremonial alley. Its architecture blends modern Arab-Muslim styles with the monumental ambitions of a national founder. The central golden dome is flanked by two smaller green domes, and the mausoleum entrance gate is considered a fine example of Tunisian decorative art. The complex was expanded in 1978 to accommodate additional family members. Beyond Bourguiba himself, the mausoleum holds the remains of his first wife Mathilde, his parents, siblings, and other relatives, making it as much a family vault as a national shrine.

Inside the mausoleum, a small museum preserves the artifacts of Bourguiba's presidency with the intimacy of a personal collection. His desk from the presidential palace at Carthage sits alongside his pens, passports, and identity card. His glasses are displayed in a case. Photographs span a career that stretched from anti-colonial activism in the 1930s through three decades of presidential rule. Most striking are his clothes: both Western suits and traditional Tunisian garments, the jebba, chechia, and fez. The dual wardrobe captures something essential about the man, a modernizer who drew on tradition, a Francophone intellectual rooted in a specific place and culture.

Bourguiba died on April 6, 2000, more than a decade after being deposed in a bloodless coup by his prime minister, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, in 1987. He spent his last years in enforced obscurity, the father of the nation reduced to a private citizen in a guarded residence. His burial in the mausoleum he had built for himself was a final act of restitution, the country acknowledging the man even as it had moved past his era. Today the mausoleum draws visitors from across Tunisia and beyond, its golden dome visible from across Monastir, a landmark that declares both the achievements and the self-regard of the man who lies beneath it.