Tunisia's desert jewel — a palm oasis on the edge of the Sahara where Star Wars was filmed, Chott el-Jerid's salt flats shimmer at dawn, and mudbrick medinas glow at dusk
Tozeur is an oasis city of 40,000 in southwestern Tunisia's Tozeur Governorate, on the northern shore of the Chott el-Jerid — the largest salt lake in the Sahara (5,000 sq km), which dries to a crystalline crust in summer and floods in winter. The city is surrounded by a palm grove of 400,000 trees irrigated by an ancient hydraulic system dating to the 14th century, and its old medina (Ouled el-Hadef quarter) is built in a unique pinkish-yellow mudbrick style with geometric bas-relief façades. George Lucas filmed Tatooine sequences here and in nearby Nefta and Chott el-Gharsa for the original…
Tozeur's oasis has been inhabited since Neolithic times and is mentioned in Roman sources as Thusurus — a station on the trans-Saharan caravan route from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean. The city reached its medieval apogee under the Hafsid dynasty (13th–16th centuries), when it became one of the most prosperous and sophisticated oasis towns in the Maghreb, producing the distinctive mudbrick architecture of the Ouled el-Hadef quarter still visible today. The 14th-century irrigation system (the 'seguia' channels) allocates water rights from the oasis springs according to a complex sche…