The Sahara circuit with the film sets added and a camp night included. Mos Espa still stands in the dunes near Ong Jemal, twenty-five years after it was built and slowly being buried. Matmata's Sidi Driss, the Lars homestead, is on the way back.
Same spine as the classic three-day tour, with Ong Jemal and Mos Espa on the first afternoon in Tozeur — reached by 4x4 across the sand — and a night in a desert camp rather than a third hotel. The camp is charged per person and stated separately, because a family of four should not pay four times for one tent that costs us one.
Kairouan
The fourth holy city of Islam and the oldest Muslim city in North Africa. The Great Mosque is a plain fortress from outside and a forest of columns within, most of them taken from Roman and Byzantine buildings — you can still read the reuse. Non-Muslim visitors can enter the courtyard, not the prayer hall. The Aghlabid basins on the edge of town are ninth-century reservoirs, open and circular, still holding water. Dress covered here; it is a working religious city, not a monument.
Tozeur
An oasis town whose old quarter is built from projecting brickwork — the bricks are laid to stand proud of the wall in geometric patterns, so the facades read like textile. The palm grove behind the town is fed by springs and is worked, not decorative; a calèche ride through it is the usual way to see the scale. Tozeur is the base for the mountain oases and the film sets, and the last real town before the salt lake.
Tozeur
The Star Wars set built for The Phantom Menace and never taken down, standing in open dunes near Ong Jemal. Domes, doorways and moisture vaporators, weathered by twenty-five years of sand and partly buried by it — the desert is slowly taking it back. Reached by 4x4 across the sand. Ong Jemal itself, the camel-shaped rock nearby, is where the sunrise is worth the early start.
Tozeur
A mountain oasis at the foot of a bare ridge, where a spring runs out of a narrow gorge and falls into palms below. The old village was abandoned after floods in 1969 and left standing, so you walk up through empty stone houses to the water. First of the three mountain oases and the easiest to reach; the walk to the falls takes twenty minutes.
Tozeur
The largest of the mountain oases, with the abandoned old town on one side of the wadi and the new one on the other. The waterfall runs year-round, which in this landscape is startling, and the canyon below it is deep enough to change the temperature. Between Chebika and Mides on the piste along the Algerian border.
Tozeur
A gorge with sheer walls dropping straight from the village edge, right on the Algerian frontier. The old village sits on the lip of it and is largely empty; you walk to the rim and the ground simply stops. It has been filmed more than once, and the light in the late afternoon is what people come back for.
Tozeur
A salt lake the size of a small country, crossed on a causeway built straight across the middle. In summer it is dry and blinding white; after rain it holds a film of water and mirrors the sky, and the far shore appears to float. The colours shift with the mineral content — pinks and rust in patches that look artificial in photographs and are not. Stop, get out, walk on the crust a little way. It is the strangest half hour on any southern circuit.
Kébili
Where the tarmac ends and the Grand Erg Oriental begins, which is why it is called the gate of the desert. The dunes start at the edge of town, so you are on sand within minutes rather than after an hour of driving. Camels go out from here in the late afternoon, when the light is worth having and the heat has gone. The Thursday market is a real regional market rather than a tourist one.
Gabès
The houses are dug down into the ground rather than built on it — a central pit for a courtyard, rooms cut horizontally into its walls, cool in summer and warm in winter. Some are still lived in. Sidi Driss, now a hotel, was the Lars homestead in the first Star Wars film and has kept the set dressing. The landscape above ground is bare and lunar, which is presumably what recommended it.
Mahdia
The amphitheatre is the third largest that survives and the most complete thing the Romans left in Africa — room for something like thirty-five thousand people in a town that now has far fewer. What makes it worth the stop rather than the photograph is that you can go down into the underground passages where animals and fighters were held and come up into the arena the way they did. It stands directly in the town, so it arrives without warning above the rooftops.
No. Ong Jemal is worth the early start for the dunes alone, and the rest of the circuit is the standard southern route. If the sets do not interest you, the classic three-day tour costs less and goes to the same oases.
3 days / 2 nights · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
Mos Espa and Ong Jemal near Tozeur, and Sidi Driss at Matmata — the Lars homestead, now a hotel that has kept the set dressing. Ksar Hdada is on the four-day southern circuit instead.
Yes, and it is still open desert rather than a managed attraction. The sand is taking it back a little more each year, which is part of why people go now.
Yes, and it is priced per person on top of the vehicle price — stated on the booking page rather than buried, so you can see exactly what the night costs.
Before sunrise if you want the light everyone photographs. It is optional; say so the night before and the driver plans the morning either way.
Distances are straight-line, measured between the coordinates on our map of the sites; road distances are longer. Prices are per vehicle and come from the same database the 34 tours and 1,392 transfer fares.
