Star Wars in Tunisia: visiting Tatooine

Where Luke grew up. The Lars family courtyard is, in real life, one of the troglodyte (underground) houses of the Berber village of Matmata — a working hotel called Hotel Sidi Driss. You can have lunch in the same circular dining room where Aunt Beru served blue milk, sleep in one of the cave rooms, and wander the very corridors used in A New Hope and Attack of the Clones. It's still a basic working hotel, not a museum. That's the charm. Combine with a wider Matmata visit — there are several other troglodyte houses you can tour.

The fortified granary villages — ksars — of the Tataouine region were used for Mos Espa exteriors and various other Tatooine scenes (Anakin's slave quarters, the spaceport). Ksar Hadada, Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Medenine are the most-visited, and each is genuinely spectacular as Berber architecture in its own right. Most are still partially in use as storage. Some include small museums and cafés. Easy to combine with a Matmata loop.