Quick Answer Tunisia stood in for the desert planet Tatooine in four Star Wars films — A New Hope (1977) and the entire prequel trilogy (1999–2005). The filming was concentrated in seven locations across the south of the country: Matmata, Chott el-Jerid, Ong Jmal and the Mos Espa set near Tozeur, the canyon of Sidi Bouhlel, the Berber ksour around Tataouine, and three sites on the island of Djerba. Most are still standing. The Mos Espa set, in particular, is being slowly swallowed by the dunes — visit before the desert finishes the job. Allow three to five days from Tunis if you want to do them all.
George Lucas needed a planet that didn’t look like Earth. Tunisia, it turned out, had one.
He came in 1976 with a film crew, an unfinished script, and a notion that the dune sea south of Nefta was the most alien-looking landscape he had ever seen. The film he was shooting, Star Wars, would be released the following year and change cinema. The country he was shooting it in lent its name to the planet the film was set on — Tatooine, after the town of Tataouine in Tunisia’s south — and would go on to host three more films across the next three decades. The desert kept its end of the bargain. The sets kept appearing. And after the cameras left for the last time in 2005, the sets stayed.
Most of them are still there. Some have been carefully preserved, some have been abandoned, and one is being eaten by sand at a rate of perhaps a metre a year. This is the field guide to all of them.
What Tunisia Actually Filmed
The Tunisia chapter of Star Wars covers four films:
- A New Hope (Episode IV, released 1977) — the original. Tatooine scenes shot at Chott el-Jerid, Sidi Bouhlel canyon, Matmata, and the ksour of the south.
- The Phantom Menace (Episode I, 1999) — return to Tunisia after a 22-year gap. The Mos Espa set was purpose-built outside Tozeur. The Lars Homestead was rebuilt. Anakin Skywalker’s slave quarters were filmed in the ksour.
- Attack of the Clones (Episode II, 2002) — brief return for additional Lars Homestead exterior work at Chott el-Jerid.
- Revenge of the Sith (Episode III, 2005) — the final closing shot, with Obi-Wan handing the infant Luke to his aunt and uncle, filmed once again at Chott el-Jerid.
Return of the Jedi (Episode VI) and the sequel trilogy did not film in Tunisia. The original Return of the Jedi Tatooine scenes were shot in Yuma, Arizona; the sequels used Abu Dhabi and Jordan. Tunisia’s role is closed at four films — but those four films include the most iconic Tatooine sequences in the franchise, and the sets they left behind are still the only place on Earth where Tatooine physically exists.
The Names Were Always Tunisian
The borrowing went deeper than the desert. A surprising amount of Star Wars vocabulary — entire planets, characters, creatures — is lifted directly from the Tunisian map.
Tatooine is Tataouine, the governorate town in the south. Mos Espa echoes Sfax and the prefix Mos that the production may have heard locally. The three moons of Tatooine in the prequels are named Ghomrassen, Guermessa, and Chenini — all real Berber villages in the Tataouine mountains. Nefta is both a Tunisian oasis town and a humanoid Star Wars species. Jerba is an animal native to the planet Tatooine — and the island in southeast Tunisia where four scenes were filmed. The Mos Eisley region is sometimes called the Tozeer System, after Tozeur.
This is the most concentrated act of fictional naming-from-life in modern cinema. Tunisia did not just lend Lucas the landscape. It lent him the dictionary too.
A North-to-South Field Guide to the Sites
The locations are spread across roughly six hundred kilometres of southern Tunisia, from the salt flats around Tozeur to the island of Djerba. Here they are in the order it makes practical sense to visit, working roughly south from the Sahara guide we already wrote on the Tunisian desert.
Sidi Bouhlel — The Star Wars Canyon
Twelve kilometres northeast of Tozeur, a narrow ravine cut through pale sedimentary rock runs for about half a kilometre and ends in a small palm oasis. Locals call it Sidi Bouhlel, after the marabout buried at the end of the canyon. Star Wars fans know it as something else: this is the location where Luke Skywalker first meets Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope, where the Jawas capture R2-D2, and where eight other scenes were filmed across the franchise. Raiders of the Lost Ark and The English Patient used the same canyon. There is no signage. The ravine looks, from the road, like any other minor wadi. You walk in and the cinema arrives by association.
Best visited in the morning, when the light hits the canyon walls from the east. Bring water. There is no shade once you’re inside the cut.
Ong Jmal and the Mos Espa Set
Forty kilometres west of Tozeur, deep in the desert past the oasis of Nefta, a strange rock formation rises above the dune sea. It is called Ong Jmal — the Camel’s Neck — for its silhouette. Around it, the production of The Phantom Menace built the most ambitious Star Wars set ever attempted on location: an entire town. Mos Espa, the slave port where the young Anakin Skywalker grew up.
What is astonishing is that almost all of it is still there.
Walk through the set today and you will find the main gate intact, the rounded mud-brick domes of the slave quarters still standing, the moisture vaporators still poking out of the sand. The buildings were constructed of plaster over wooden frames and were never meant to last more than a few weeks of filming. They have lasted nearly thirty years. The desert is the only force now working against them. The Sahara is migrating north at a rate measurable in metres per year, and the dunes are now lapping at — and in some places overtaking — the eastern edge of the set. The original main square has been swallowed.
A few souvenir vendors set up tables near the entrance. They are not aggressive. There is no entrance fee at present. Access is by 4×4 from Tozeur, usually as a day excursion combined with Ong Jmal and Chott el-Jerid; any guesthouse in Tozeur can arrange one for around 80–120 dinars per vehicle.
The set will not last. The estimate from the few archaeologists who have looked at it is fifteen to twenty years before the dunes finish what they started. If you want to walk down the main street of Tatooine, you have a window.
The Lars Homestead at Chott el-Jerid
An hour’s drive east of Tozeur, the great salt lake of Chott el-Jerid stretches almost to the Algerian border — a flat white surface that turns pink in certain light and that the films used as the surface of Tatooine itself.
In the middle of the chott, twenty minutes’ walk off the main causeway road, sits a small white igloo-shaped structure. This is the exterior of the Lars Homestead — the moisture farm where Luke Skywalker grew up. The two-sun sunset that closes A New Hope‘s opening sequence was filmed here. The two-sun sunset that opens Revenge of the Sith‘s final scene was filmed here. The dome you see today was reconstructed in 2012 by a group of fans calling themselves the Save the Lars Homestead project, who crowdfunded the restoration and flew out from France, the UK, and the US to do the work themselves. The Tunisian Ministry of Culture later took over preservation.
Accessible by 4×4 from the causeway road, or by a thirty-minute walk if you don’t mind salt crust and a complete absence of shade. Best at sunrise or in the last hour before sunset, when the light flattens and you can see the dome from a kilometre away. The reason the films chose this location is the same reason it should be seen at the right time of day: this is some of the strangest light on Earth.
Hotel Sidi Driss, Matmata
Two hours southeast of Tozeur, in the Berber town of Matmata, sits a working hotel built around a sunken courtyard cut into the earth. Hotel Sidi Driss is a traditional troglodyte dwelling — one of the underground homes the Berbers of this region have built for centuries to escape the surface heat — and it is also the interior of the Lars Homestead. The kitchen where Aunt Beru fries up blue milk. The dining table where Luke complains about going to Tosche Station. The hallway where Luke watches the holographic message of Princess Leia. All filmed inside this hotel.
You can stay here. Rooms are cheap, the breakfast is fine, and the décor includes a few Star Wars props left over from the prequels. It is a tourist hotel, and it leans into it cheerfully — but the underlying architecture is genuinely Berber, genuinely centuries old, and worth a night for that alone. The region around Matmata, with its honeycombed cave dwellings, is one of the most distinctive landscapes in the country and was the reason Lucas filmed here in the first place. A wider survey is in our piece on Tunisia’s most charming small towns.
The Ksour of Tataouine — Mos Espa’s Slave Quarters
Continue an hour south of Matmata and you enter the country of the ksour — fortified Berber granaries, sometimes hundreds of small vaulted cells stacked three and four storeys high around a central courtyard. The prequel films used three of them.
Ksar Hadada, abandoned and dramatic, played the slave quarters of Mos Espa in The Phantom Menace. You walk through narrow corridors between stacks of ghorfas — the small barrel-vaulted cells — and the architecture does most of the work for you. It looks, without modification, like a frontier moisture-farming town on a backwater planet. Lucas understood the assignment.
Ksar Ouled Soltane, twenty minutes further south near the town of Tataouine itself, is the best-preserved ksar in Tunisia and possibly the most photogenic. It was also used in the slave quarters sequences and is, in some scenes, intercut with Ksar Hadada. The double courtyard, four storeys of cells stacked around it, is a wonder of vernacular architecture. It is also on Tunisia’s UNESCO Tentative List.
Ksar Medenine, in the regional capital of the same name, is more touristed and partly converted into souvenir shops, but the architecture remains.
These three sites work as a single day-trip out of Tataouine or Djerba.
Djerba — Mos Eisley, Tosche Station, and Ben’s Hermitage
Three Star Wars locations sit on the island of Djerba, in Tunisia’s southeast.
In the fishing village of Ajim, on Djerba’s west coast, an unassuming whitewashed building — formerly a bakery, now in ruins — was used as the exterior of the Mos Eisley Cantina. The famous cantina interior was shot on a soundstage in England, but the doorway you’d be queueing at if Han Solo were inside is on a quiet street in Ajim. Locals point you to it without prompting.
At Sidi Jmour, a desolate stretch of Djerba’s western coast, a small marabout shrine was used as Tosche Station in deleted scenes from A New Hope. It’s the most fragmentary of the Djerba locations — go for the coastline, stay for the cinematic footnote.
And on the north of the island, Ben Kenobi’s hermitage was filmed at a small structure on the Djerba shoreline that has since largely succumbed to the sea. What remains is partial. The setting — Mediterranean shallows on a quiet stretch of beach — is worth the visit regardless.
Our things to do on Djerba piece covers what to combine these stops with.
The State of the Sets Today
The honest assessment, location by location:
The Lars Homestead at Chott el-Jerid is stable, thanks to the fan restoration and subsequent ministry maintenance.
Hotel Sidi Driss in Matmata is thriving — it is a working hotel with regular income from Star Wars tourism.
The ksour of Tataouine are independently preserved as cultural heritage sites, with no special Star Wars protection but no special threat either.
Sidi Bouhlel canyon is unchanged — a natural feature, not a built set.
The Djerba locations are fragmentary but still identifiable.
The Mos Espa set is declining. The dunes are advancing. There are no significant restoration funds. UNESCO has shown no inclination to step in because the structures are too recent. The set will not be here in twenty years. This is the urgent visit on the list.
A long-promised EU-funded “Tunisia Cinematic Route” announced in 2020 to formalise tourism around these sites has progressed slowly. Signage in some locations has improved. A dedicated visitor centre at Mos Espa was discussed and not built. The route is, in practical terms, what it always was — a road trip you organise yourself with a guide and a 4×4.
How to Actually Visit — Itineraries
A long weekend (3 days) from Tunis can hit the Tozeur cluster — Sidi Bouhlel, Ong Jmal, the Mos Espa set, and the Lars Homestead at Chott el-Jerid. Fly from Tunis to Tozeur (one hour, Tunisair Express) on day one, base in Tozeur for two nights, hire a 4×4 with driver for the desert run. Fly back on day three.
Five days lets you add Matmata and the ksour. Tozeur for three nights, then drive east to Matmata (four hours), sleep at Hotel Sidi Driss for the experience, day-trip to Ksar Hadada and Ksar Ouled Soltane, return to Tunis by overnight train from Gabès.
A full week adds Djerba. Ferry from the Tunisian mainland or a short hop on Tunisair Express from Tozeur. Two nights on the island, hire a car, hit Ajim and Sidi Jmour, then fly back to Tunis from Djerba-Zarzis airport.
If you are starting from a beach holiday in Hammamet or Sousse rather than Tunis, the math is similar — add a day on each end for the long drive south. Our Tunisian Sahara guide maps the full southern itinerary in more detail.
When to Go
October through April. The Sahara in summer is genuinely dangerous — daytime temperatures of 45°C and higher are routine, the Mos Espa set offers no shade, and the salt of Chott el-Jerid reflects the sun in a way that has put more than one visitor in a Tozeur clinic. Spring (March to May) and autumn (October to November) are the windows. Winter (December to February) is fine for the desert itself but the nights are cold; pack accordingly. Our best time to visit Tunisia guide has the full month-by-month breakdown.
A Note on May the Fourth
Every year on May 4 — the Star Wars fan holiday — a small contingent of cosplayers makes the pilgrimage to Tozeur and the Mos Espa set. The Tozeur tourism office has occasionally organised informal gatherings. There is no official festival yet. If you want company on the trip, this is the date. If you want the set to yourself, pick any other week.
From the Carthage Magazine Bookshelf
If the flight is booked — or close to it — three Carthage Magazine ebooks were built for the days between arrival and departure:
- All About Tunisia — the definitive English-language traveler’s guide. 572 pages, 27 chapters, all nine regions, every UNESCO inscription, five thematic trails — and the practical answers (visa, currency, transport, etiquette) most travelers wish they’d had on the plane. $24.99 · PDF & EPUB
- Speak Like a Local — 200+ Tunisian Arabic phrases with native audio recorded in Tunis. The phrases for the taxi, the souk, the café, and the dinner table. $14.99 · PDF, EPUB, MP3
- The Authentic Tunisian Cookbook — sixty traditional recipes from the heart of North Africa. For when you get home and find yourself missing the food. $9.99 · PDF & EPUB
All three available as a bundle for $39.99 — guide, language, and food, delivered together.
