Matmata is a Berber village in the hills of the Gabès governorate of southern Tunisia, dug downward rather than built up, its houses sunk as pits ten metres deep into the soft rock with rooms tunnelled sideways out of the courtyards, invisible from the plain and holding an even temperature through the desert year, and it is visited for the pit-house hotel that was filmed as the home of Luke Skywalker. The Berbers dug the houses for the cool and for concealment, and hundreds of families still live in them, a round courtyard open to the sky with the bedrooms, the stores and the kitchen bored into its walls and a tunnel sloping up to the surface; the Hotel Sidi Driss is five pits linked by tunnels, and one of them is the courtyard filmed in 1976 as the interior of the Lars homestead, the set dressing still fixed to the curved walls, with only the inside here, since the exterior with the domes stands on the salt lake near Tozeur. Off the courtyard one chamber is darker than the rest, the cooking room, its ceiling blackened by generations of smoke, and the families open their courtyards to visitors for a small fee and tea.
The hills around the village get about 200 millimetres of rain a year on thirty or forty days, nearly all between autumn and spring and rarely gently, with a handful of violent storms sending the dry wadis running for a day and refilling the rock-cut cisterns the village lives on, and the terraces built across the wadis hold the water for olives and figs, picked through July and August and spread out to dry. Camels kneel at the edge of the village for rides out onto the plateau the houses hide in, from which the village is a scatter of holes, and in March 1943 the Mareth Line ran from the sea to these hills, with the British force sent to outflank it threading straight through them. Matmata is a village that lives underground, and a film made its kitchen famous.