Filming locations in Southern Tunisia

For a certain kind of traveller, southern Tunisia is hallowed ground, because this is where Tatooine was born. George Lucas filmed the original Star Wars here in 1977, and the most evocative survivor is the Lars Homestead, the white domed igloo standing on the cracked salt crust of Chott el Djerid, which served as the exterior of Luke Skywalker's boyhood home. To find it intact, decades on, in the middle of an empty white plain, is genuinely stirring.

The set sits out in the open desert near the village of Nefta and is free to reach, but it is remote, so you come either by 4x4 or, more easily, on a guided trip from the oasis town of Tozeur. There are no facilities at all out there, no shade, no water, no shop, so this is a place to arrive self-sufficient and leave nothing behind.

Tozeur makes the natural base for the whole region, a date-palm oasis with a distinctive patterned-brick old town and onward routes deeper into the dunes and the salt flats. From here it is an easy reach to the homestead and to the other-worldly desert that gave the saga its first alien horizon.

Time and heat are the two things to respect. The salt flats are blinding and the temperatures punishing once the sun is high, so set out early, beat the worst of the day, and carry far more water than you think you need, along with a hat and proper sun cover. The light at dawn, when the white crust turns faintly pink, is also when the homestead looks most like the screen.

Beyond this one pilgrimage, southern Tunisia rewards the curious with troglodyte villages and more desert sets scattered towards Matmata, the kind of landscape that needed no special effects to look like another planet. But the Lars Homestead on its lonely salt flat is the moment that brings most fans here, and it more than earns the journey.