Matmata, Tunisia

Where it sits. Matmata lies roughly 43 kilometres south of Gabès in the Jebel Dahar, the low ridge of chalky marl and limestone that divides the coastal Jeffara plain from the stony approaches to the Grand Erg Oriental. The village sits at about 600 metres on a rumpled plateau the colour of bone, eroded into rounded hummocks and shallow gullies. Seen from the road that drops in from the north, the settlement is almost invisible. What appears to be a field of craters is the village itself, because the houses of Matmata were dug down into the rock rather than built up out of it. A few hundred people still live in the old pit quarter; most of the commune now lives in New Matmata, a conventional grid of concrete houses about 15 kilometres away on the plain.

How a pit house works. The builder starts by digging a circular or rectangular shaft into the soft marl, typically six to ten metres deep and eight to twelve metres across. That hole becomes the courtyard. Rooms are then tunnelled horizontally out of the courtyard walls, three to five metres deep, barrel-vaulted, and finished with a skin of gypsum plaster that is renewed every few years. A sloping ramp or a stepped tunnel connects the courtyard to the surface, wide enough for a loaded donkey. Storage cells are cut higher in the wall and reached by projecting stone steps set into the plaster. The physics are the point: the marl is a poor conductor, so a courtyard interior holds the low twenties in Celsius while the surface bakes above forty, and the same mass releases warmth through cold desert nights. Rain is the weakness. Saturated marl slumps, and a bad winter can collapse a vault.

The floods that changed the village. In the autumn of 1969 southern Tunisia was hit by weeks of exceptional rain. Pits filled, walls sheared, and a large share of the housing stock in Matmata and neighbouring villages became unsafe. The state response was to build New Matmata on the flat and to lay a proper road up into the hills, which is how a settlement that had been genuinely remote acquired a bus route. Many families moved. A stubborn minority stayed underground, and within a decade the road that had been built for resettlement was carrying tour coaches in the opposite direction.

On screen. In the spring of 1976 the crew of the first Star Wars film dressed the linked pits of the Hotel Sidi Driss on the edge of the village as the interior of the Lars homestead on Tatooine. The sunken courtyard is where Aunt Beru fills a jug and where Owen argues with Luke about staying another season, and the curving plaster ribs, hemispherical panels and pipe fittings the art department bolted onto the walls turned a Berber granary loft into a moisture farmer's kitchen. The production returned in September 2000, shooting the same courtyard again for Attack of the Clones, this time as the home Anakin comes back to. On that second visit the dressing was left in place rather than stripped out, which is the only reason anything survives.

What is actually there today. The Sidi Driss is still a working hotel, and one of its four courtyards still carries the film fittings. They are worth seeing and worth being honest about: the paint has faded to a chalky grey-blue, several moulded panels are missing, cracks have been filled with cement, and a low rope and a lot of dust separate the visitor from the rest. The hotel itself is spartan. Guest rooms are unlit vaulted cells off the other courtyards, furnished with a mattress and a blanket, with shared washing facilities, no heating and intermittent hot water. Coaches from Djerba and Douz pull in at lunchtime, the restaurant fills for an hour, and a small charge is levied on anyone who only wants to look at the set.

The rest of the village. Several families open their own pits to visitors for a few dinars and demonstrate weaving on a vertical loom or the grinding of barley. The nearby hamlet of Haddej has an underground olive press with a camel-turned stone wheel, dug into the rock for the same thermal reasons. The road east toward Toujane and Medenine climbs across bare ridges and past terraced check dams built to slow the runoff that once wrecked the village. Berber is still spoken in the older households alongside Tunisian Arabic.

Getting there and timing. Shared louage taxis run from Gabès in about an hour on the C107, which climbs through Techine into the hills; there is no useful onward public transport, so the ksour of Tataouine to the south need a hired car or a driver. October to April is the sensible window. Midday light flattens the pits into featureless holes, so early morning or the last hour before sunset is the time to be standing on the rim.