Tataouine

Where it sits. Tataouine is the administrative capital of Tunisia's southernmost inland governorate, a town of some sixty thousand people set at around 250 metres where the Dahar plateau breaks down into the stony Jeffara plain. It is roughly 500 kilometres south of Tunis, 50 kilometres inland from Medenine, and about 150 kilometres from the Libyan border. The setting is austere: grey-brown hills without trees, wide dry wadis that carry water for a few hours a year, and a low modern town of white and ochre buildings arranged around a market square and a long main avenue. Nothing about the place is picturesque in the conventional sense, and that is largely the point of coming.

How the town began. Tataouine grew from a French military post established at the end of the nineteenth century to control the ksour country and the routes toward Libya. For decades the garrison included disciplinary units, and the town's name entered French slang as shorthand for the most distant posting imaginable, a usage that survives in phrases meaning to be sent to the ends of the earth. The administrative function stuck. Today the town is a market and government centre for a vast, thinly populated hinterland, with heavy seasonal movement of labour to Libya and the coast.

The name and the films. George Lucas took the name of the desert planet in Star Wars from this town, and that borrowing is the reason a great many visitors arrive. It is worth stating clearly that nothing in any Star Wars film was shot in Tataouine itself. The sets are in the surrounding country: Ksar Ouled Soltane, about 20 kilometres southeast, and Ksar Hadada, about 40 kilometres north near Ghomrassen, both used as the slave quarters of Mos Espa in Episode I. The town is the base, not the location, and the local tourism trade has grown up accordingly, with hotels and drivers organised around ksour circuits rather than around any single site in town.

The ksour circuit. What justifies several days here is the density of granary architecture and cliff villages within an hour's drive. The essential stops:

• Ksar Ouled Soltane — two courtyards of vaulted ghorfas stacked four storeys, the best-preserved example in the region and the most photographed.
• Chenini — a Berber village built into a steep ridge beneath a ruined citadel, with a white mosque on the saddle and terraced fields below.
• Douiret — a comparable hillside settlement, largely abandoned, with cave dwellings and a restored mosque.
• Guermessa — the quietest of the three hill villages, reached by a rough road, its old quarter almost entirely empty.
• Ksar Hadada — the ruinous, sprawling ksar north of town used in Episode I.

Market days and the festival. Tataouine's souk runs on Monday and Thursday and is a genuine regional market rather than a tourist one: livestock, grain, blankets, plastic goods, dates and the heavy woollen cloaks worn in the Dahar winter. The Festival International des Ksour Sahariens, usually held in the spring, brings music, poetry, horse and camel displays, and events staged inside the ksour themselves; dates shift from year to year and are worth confirming locally before planning around them.

A note on fossils. The Cretaceous sandstones around Tataouine are among the richest dinosaur-bearing beds in North Africa, and the formation itself carries the town's name. Material collected here has produced described species, including a sauropod named for the region, and fossil fragments turn up routinely in the wadi beds. Collecting and export are regulated, and the stalls selling "fossils" in the souk sell a mixture of genuine invertebrate material and manufactured pieces. The same sandstones give the landscape its structure: banded cliffs, flat-topped mesas and wadis choked with pale gravel, all of it easiest to read in the first hour of daylight when the strata catch the sun edge-on.

Getting there and timing. Shared louage taxis run frequently from Medenine, and less frequently from Gabès and Djerba; buses connect to Tunis overnight. Most visitors arrive by hired car from Djerba, three hours away, which is also the nearest airport. Accommodation in town is limited to a handful of modest hotels, and there are guesthouses in the ksour villages. October to April is the workable season; July and August routinely exceed 45 °C. Travellers should check current government advice before heading further south or east from Tataouine, since the zones approaching the Libyan frontier are subject to restrictions and are treated differently from the ksour circuit immediately around the town.