Matmata is a small Berber town in southern Tunisia famous for its extraordinary troglodyte architecture — villages carved into the hillside and underground dwellings hollowed out of the earth. The name comes from the Berber tribes who took refuge in this isolated region, and their descendants still live in these unusual homes today. The town is also known internationally as a filming location for Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the lunar landscape of craters and ochre ridges stood in for alien worlds. The Hotel Sidi Driss is the original set for Luke Skywalker's home — you can stay the night in Tatooine.
The villages look almost invisible from a distance. What appears to be an empty hillside is actually densely inhabited: each crater is a house, with a central circular courtyard sunk into the ground and rooms radiating outward from the walls. A tunnel leads in from the surface, often lined with storage spaces and stables. The steep courtyard walls are honeycombed with niches for living, cooking, and storing food — the upper chambers, sometimes only reachable by rope, serve as granaries. The design is a masterpiece of natural climate control: cool in summer when temperatures exceed 40°C, and warm in winter. The panoramic viewpoint south of town is the spot that reveals just how invisible the houses are.
Matmata sits about 40 km from the coast and 400 m above sea level, among barren ochre mountains that rise to 700 m. The ridges and conical summits are cut by deep ravines where figs, olives, barley, and stunted palms grow. For a less touristed version of the same troglodyte lifestyle, the nearby villages of Beni Aissa, Chembali, Techine, and Hedege receive far fewer visitors and feel more genuinely inhabited. The hill village of Old Matmata (el-Kedima) just to the north is also worth the short trip out.