Matmata is a Berber village in southern Tunisia that was built downwards. A pit is sunk into the soft ground to make a courtyard, and the rooms are tunnelled sideways out of its walls. From the plain there is nothing to see: no roofline, no street, only round dimples you would otherwise walk straight past. Inside, the temperature around you hardly moves all year. Off the courtyard one chamber is darker than the others, the kitchen, its ceiling blackened by generations of smoke. Beside it stand the storerooms and the loft above them, where a household kept a full year of grain, oil and dates in clay jars against the wall. Camels kneel at the village edge waiting for riders, and a short circuit over the plateau is the slow way for you to read the ground the Berbers had to work with: pale stone, dry gullies, and those dimples appearing one after another.
The Hotel Sidi Driss is five pits linked by tunnels, and you can stand in the one filmed as the inside of Luke Skywalker's home, its set dressing still fixed to the curved walls. It leads a strange double life — a plain Berber guesthouse, lit like a cave, that fans cross the world to photograph. Only the inside is here, though. The white dome everyone pictures on the outside was a purpose-built set about 300 kilometres west, out on the salt flats. What hangs on these walls now is the prequel's dressing, because the 1976 decoration was stripped out after filming. What feeds the village is the same instinct as the houses: work the ground rather than build on it. Around 200 millimetres of rain falls here a year, on thirty or forty days. Across the gullies the villagers throw jessour, earth-and-stone dikes that catch silt until a field builds up behind them, and olives, figs, almonds and barley grow where there would otherwise be bare rock. It takes about twenty millimetres of rain in a day to set one working; anything lighter just runs away. The system is at least seventeen centuries old.