Star Wars filming locations: Matmata and Tozeur for fans

Matmata and Tozeur sit about a day’s drive apart across southern Tunisia’s desert interior, and between them they account for most of the Tunisian footage in the original Star Wars trilogy, plus desert scenes used in The English Patient. Matmata gives you the one location every fan recognises on sight; Tozeur gives you the wider desert that stood in for somewhere else entirely.

Matmata: the Lars homestead, still a working hotel

The troglodyte dwellings of Matmata — underground courtyard houses dug into the hillsides to stay cool — were used as Luke Skywalker’s childhood home in the original film. The specific site, Hotel Sidi Driss, still operates as a hotel today, and you can walk through the same circular courtyard and stay in rooms built into the same pits the production used. What’s changed is context rather than structure: decades of visitors have left the space feeling more like a film landmark than a family home, and some of the set-adjacent details fans remember from photos were temporary dressing, not part of the building itself. The underground rooms and courtyard shape are real and unaltered; expect a hotel with a history, not a preserved film set.

Tozeur and the desert that played someone else’s planet

Tozeur itself is an oasis town, but the flat, pale desert stretching out from it — toward Nefta and the salt flats of Chott el Djerid — is what the cameras wanted. Sections of this landscape were used for desert exteriors, and the same stark terrain later stood in for North African desert scenes in The English Patient. Unlike Matmata’s single identifiable building, there’s no one fixed spot to photograph here; it’s the openness of the terrain itself that was the draw, which means the “location” is really a stretch of desert you pass through rather than a landmark you arrive at.

What’s there now, at a glance

Location	Film connection	What you’ll actually find
Hotel Sidi Driss, Matmata	Lars homestead interior	A functioning hotel, courtyard and rooms intact
Desert around Nefta/Chott el Djerid	Desert exteriors, later The English Patient	Open terrain, no fixed set remains
Tozeur oasis town	Base for exploring the area	Palmeries, old town, starting point for trips out

Gabès is your gateway into Matmata

Matmata itself is a small hill town with no airport and no rail line, so most visitors reach it through Gabès, the coastal city that sits closest to the Matmata plateau. From Gabès, shared taxis and organised day trips run up into the hills regularly enough that you don’t need to plan the connection days in advance, though the last return departures can thin out once the afternoon turns to evening. If you’re coming from the Hammamet or Sousse coast rather than flying directly south, treat Gabès as the staging point where you switch from coastal travel mode to desert-interior travel mode — different pace, different expectations about timetables.

Combining the two in one trip

Matmata and Tozeur aren’t next to each other, and the honest way to plan this is as two separate stops on a southern Tunisia loop rather than a single day trip. Most visitors route through Douz or Kebili between them, using the drive itself as a chance to see the desert landscape the films used rather than treating it as dead time. If you’re covering this route without a private driver, weigh louage against a rental car for a desert-bound itinerary before you commit — the fixed-departure nature of louage matters more on this leg than almost anywhere else in the country.

Manage your expectations before you go

Fans who show up expecting a preserved set are usually disappointed for the wrong reason: nothing in southern Tunisia was built to last as a film attraction, because nothing here was built for fans in the first place. Matmata’s courtyard is genuinely the same space, which is worth the detour on its own; the desert scenes are genuinely the same landscape, which is a different kind of payoff than a building you can point a camera at. Go for the real locations, not for souvenir infrastructure that was never built around them. There’s no dedicated museum, no marked trail of “the spots,” and no staff trained to point out camera angles — what you get is a real hotel and a real desert that happen to carry this history, and you do the connecting yourself.

Before you head into the desert interior

Signal gets patchy once you’re off the coast and into the interior towns, so settle logistics — maps saved offline, accommodation confirmed, the next day’s route checked — while you still have a reliable connection, rather than discovering a dead zone halfway to Matmata. This matters more on this route than on a coastal holiday, because there’s no second hotel wifi a few hundred metres away if the one you’re relying on drops. Installing our eSIM app before you fly, then activating the profile the moment you land, means you’re not depending on hotel wifi in towns where it can be slow or shared across the whole building, and it keeps working the same way whether you’re in Gabès, Matmata or out past Tozeur. See current plans on the pricing page and the setup guides for your phone before you leave the coast behind.