Tozeur

Where it sits. Tozeur is the principal oasis town of the Djerid, set on the northern shore of Chott el Djerid where the salt pan meets a shelf of firmer ground fed by springs. The palm grove that gives the town its reason to exist covers well over a thousand hectares and holds several hundred thousand date palms, laid out in an irrigated grid of walled gardens beneath which pomegranates, figs and vegetables are grown in the shade. Beyond the grove in every direction is either salt crust or gravel desert. The Algerian border lies about 60 kilometres west, Nefta 23 kilometres in the same direction, and the mountain oases of the Jebel en Negueb rise to the north.

Water and the man who divided it. An oasis this size is an engineering problem before it is anything else. Tozeur's gardens are supplied by a network of channels fed historically by around two hundred springs, and the allocation of that water is traditionally credited to Ibn Chabbat, a thirteenth-century scholar who devised a system in which each garden received flow for a measured period rather than a measured volume, with the shares recorded and inherited. Variants of the arrangement were still in operation into the modern era. Spring flow has since fallen sharply and much of the grove now depends on deep boreholes, a shift that has changed the water table and is visible in dying palms at the grove's dry margins.

The brick quarter. The old quarter of Ouled el Hadef, laid out from the fourteenth century, is the architectural reason to come. Its walls are built of ochre-yellow bricks fired from local chott clay and laid so that individual bricks project from the wall face in geometric relief, producing lozenges, chevrons and stepped patterns that many observers connect to the motifs of regional weaving. The lanes between are narrow, often partly covered, and the effect at low sun, when the relief throws hard shadow across the facades, is unlike anything else in North Africa. Restoration work has stabilised parts of the quarter; other blocks are empty and slumping.

A film town. Tozeur has been the base of operations for desert productions in Tunisia for half a century, because it combines an airport, hotels and a location list within an hour's drive. The Star Wars crews worked from here and from Nefta in 1976, 1997 and 2000, filming at the canyon of Sidi Bouhlel north of town, at the Lars homestead site on the salt west of Nefta, and at the Mos Espa set on the Ong Jemel plain. The same canyon was used by the Raiders of the Lost Ark unit in 1980 for its Egyptian desert material, and The English Patient shot its Sahara sequences on the dunes northwest of Nefta in 1995. Local drivers have built a substantial trade on these sites, and the standard half-day circuit takes in the salt pan, the homestead dome and Mos Espa.

What else the town holds. The Dar Cherait museum presents regional interiors and costume in a purpose-built complex on the hotel strip; the Eden Palm centre explains date cultivation with a working plantation; and calèche drivers run circuits through the palm grove from the edge of the old town, following irrigation channels between mud walls under continuous shade. The souks around the old quarter deal in blankets, brassware and the coarse woven cloth of the region, and the traders here work a much shorter tourist season than their counterparts on the coast. Tozeur is the centre of the Deglet Nour trade, and the harvest from October to December is the moment to see the grove working rather than performing, with pickers roped into crowns and crates stacked along the tracks. Belvedere Rock, a low outcrop on the southern edge of the grove, is the conventional sunset viewpoint over the chott, with the pan turning from white to rose as the light goes and the palms behind it dropping into silhouette.

Getting there and timing. Tozeur-Nefta International Airport, a few kilometres northwest of town, has domestic flights from Tunis and seasonal international services. Louage taxis connect to Gafsa, Kebili and Douz; the causeway road across Chott el Djerid to Kebili is one of the great drives in the country. October to April is the season, with pleasant days around 20 °C in midwinter and cold nights; May to September becomes progressively brutal, with summer highs above 45 °C. Spring can bring sand-laden wind that closes desert tracks for days. Anything involving the salt pan or the film sets needs four-wheel drive and a driver who knows the current state of the tracks, which change after every serious rain.