Ksar Ouled Soltane

Where it sits. Ksar Ouled Soltane stands on a low rise about 20 kilometres southeast of Tataouine, above the village of the same name, in the broken country where the Dahar plateau falls away toward the Jeffara. The approach road climbs gently through fields of olives and scattered stone-walled enclosures, and the ksar appears late, a wall of small square openings stacked four storeys high on a bare hilltop with a mosque and a handful of houses below. There is nothing green in the immediate view and nothing tall. The scale only registers on entering the first courtyard, when the walls close in and the openings turn out to be doorways.

What a ksar is for. These are not fortresses and not villages. A ksar is a communal granary, built by a group of related families who lived seasonally elsewhere with their flocks and needed somewhere safe and dry to store barley, wheat, olive oil and dates. The storage units, called ghorfas, are barrel-vaulted cells about four metres deep and two to three metres wide, built of rough stone bedded in earth mortar and rendered with gypsum. Each is closed by a palm-wood door. They are stacked in tiers up to four levels, with staircases formed from stone slabs cantilevered out of the wall face and, in places, from notched palm trunks. The vaults keep the interiors dry and stable, and the height keeps grain away from damp and from casual theft.

Two courtyards, two centuries. Ksar Ouled Soltane has an older northern courtyard and a larger southern one, joined by a short vaulted passage. The northern yard is generally dated to the fifteenth century and the southern extension to the nineteenth, when the community outgrew the original enclosure. The difference is legible in the masonry: the older cells are smaller and more irregular, the newer ones taller and more consistently coursed. Both retain their gypsum render, which is the reason this ksar photographs as it does, all soft edges and pale ochre curves rather than bare stone. It is the best-preserved of the Dahar ksour and has been repeatedly consolidated, which means some of the render and stair treads are modern work carried out over old fabric.

On screen. In July 1997 the production of Star Wars: Episode I filmed here, using the courtyards as the slave quarters of Mos Espa, the crowded district where Anakin Skywalker and his mother live. The art department added dressing to the ghorfa doorways and shot the tiered walls to make the space read as a dense residential warren rather than a granary. The nearby Ksar Hadada, north of Tataouine, was used for the same fictional district. Anyone comparing the film with the site should expect a discrepancy of scale: the courtyards are far smaller in reality than the sequences imply, and the crowd, the market clutter and the surrounding city were added around them.

What is there today. Both courtyards are open, and visitors can climb the stairs. This is worth stating plainly, because the treads are narrow, uneven, without handrails, and slippery with grit, and the upper galleries have no parapet. The interiors of the cells are empty apart from occasional rubble, though a few near the entrance still hold the wooden pegs and shelves used for storage. A caretaker collects a small fee at the gate and will usually offer to unlock cells or point out the older masonry. The ksar is still used during the annual Festival of the Ksour, when the courtyards host music and displays, and it remains a place of local significance rather than a purely archaeological one.

The wider circuit. Ksar Ouled Soltane is the strongest single stop on a route that includes the hilltop Berber villages of Chenini and Douiret, where houses are cut into the slope beneath ruined citadels, the abandoned terraces of Guermessa, and a string of smaller ksour scattered through the Dahar. Most visitors make Tataouine their base and take a full day over the loop. The landscape between the sites, low grey hills, dry wadis, herds of sheep and long empty horizons, is a substantial part of the experience.

Getting there and timing. There is no scheduled public transport to the ksar. From Tataouine it is a half-hour drive; shared taxis will run there and back for a negotiated price, and hotel drivers in Tataouine and Djerba organise day trips. October to April is the practical season, with summer temperatures well above 40 °C and no shade in either courtyard. The site works best early or late, when raking light picks out the stair treads and the courtyard walls glow; at midday the whole structure flattens into a grey grid.