Four days is the shortest circuit that reaches the ksour. Seventeen stops: Kairouan on the way down, the oases and canyons around Tozeur, the salt lake, the dunes at Douz, the underground houses at Matmata, and the fortified granaries of the deep south that the two- and three-day tours never get near.
South fast on day one, then a loop through the west before turning east into the ksour country. The Chott crossing is placed in the afternoon, when the light does what people come for.
The fourth day is what distinguishes this from the three-day Sahara tours: Toujane, Chenini, Douiret, Ghomrassen and Ksar Ouled Soltane are a different landscape and a different culture from the dunes, and they need a day of their own.
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.
Gabès
A stone village spilling down both sides of a gorge in the mountains above the Matmata plateau, on the old road between the hills and the sea. Weaving is still done here and the blankets on the walls are made locally rather than imported for the stop. The reason to come is the road itself and the view down the wadi from the village, which opens out towards the coastal plain.
Tataouine
The town at the centre of the ksour country, surrounded by fortified granaries in the hills. The name is the one George Lucas borrowed, though the film sets themselves are elsewhere. Useful as the base for reaching Chenini, Douiret and Ksar Ouled Soltane, all of which are within a short drive and none of which are on a bus route.
Tataouine
A town beneath cliffs that are honeycombed with cave dwellings, some still lived in, and the place the Tunisian tradition of the fricassé sandwich is said to come from. It sits on the road between Tataouine and the ridge villages, so it is usually passed through — but the cliffs above the town are worth the ten minutes it costs to stop.
Tataouine
A fortified granary of vaulted cells stacked around courtyards, partly restored and partly not. It was used as the slave quarters of Mos Espa in The Phantom Menace, and the film crew painted parts of it — you can still see where. Even without that it is one of the more atmospheric ksour, because you can walk right through it rather than around it.
Tataouine
A Berber village stacked along a ridge, with cave dwellings cut into the rock below a white mosque at the crest. It is still partly inhabited. The climb up is steep and worth it, and from the top you look across at the ruined ksar on the opposite spur. Of the ridge villages around Tataouine this is the one that gives the clearest picture of how the defensive settlements worked.
Tataouine
A Berber village strung along a ridge, mostly abandoned when its people moved to the plain, with a white mosque still standing at the top and cave houses cut into the rock below. Steeper and emptier than Chenini, and quieter for it. From the crest you look across bare hills in every direction and understand why anyone built up here.
Tataouine
The best-kept ksar in the south: four storeys of vaulted grain cells stacked around two courtyards, reached by stairs built into the walls with no rail. Each cell belonged to a family and held their harvest, which is why the whole thing is built like a fortress. Standing in the lower courtyard looking up is the shot everyone takes, and it is still worth taking.
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.
Three days reaches the oases and the dunes but not the ksour — see the three-day Sahara tour. Two days reaches the Chott and Douz and little else.
4 days / 3 nights · every stop above, in this order
All 11 circuits, with prices →
A different south. The dunes are landscape; the ksour are architecture — four storeys of vaulted grain stores, ridge villages built for defence, and cave dwellings still lived in. They are a full day east of Douz.
It is the most driving-dense circuit we run, because it covers the whole south in four days. The first day is the longest. If that concerns you, the six-day version spreads it out.
Yes — a camp at Ksar Ghilane can replace a hotel night, quoted with your dates. The 4x4 leg to reach it is arranged with the camp.
Ksar Hdada, which was the slave quarters in The Phantom Menace, is on the route. Mos Espa and Ong Jemal are near Tozeur and belong to the three-day Star Wars circuit.
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.
