Matmata

The Matmata hills are part of the Dahar, the dry range that runs down south-eastern Tunisia, and the people who made the pit houses are Amazigh communities who settled here long before the Arab conquest. Local tradition, and most historical accounts, treat the underground houses as a response to both climate and insecurity: cutting rooms into the friable rock gave an even temperature in a place of extreme heat and cold, used little timber in a treeless country, and left almost nothing visible on the surface for raiders crossing the hills.

The technique is simple and the results are not. A circular pit some seven to ten metres across and several metres deep is dug as a courtyard; rooms for living, storage and animals are then tunnelled into its walls, sometimes on two levels, with niches for grain jars and a sloping entrance tunnel from the hillside. Several pits could be joined underground to house an extended family, and grain stores were cut high in the walls.

The area lived on olives, barley, figs and flocks, with men migrating for work. France took control of Tunisia in 1881, and the village came to wider notice only in the twentieth century. After independence the state tried to move mountain families to new towns built on the plateau, among them Nouvelle Matmata, and in 1969 rains that lasted twenty-two days flooded the pit houses and brought many of them down, after which more families moved above ground. In 1976 the crew of the first Star Wars film used a converted pit complex, the Hotel Sidi Driss, for interior scenes, and the association brought a steady stream of visitors. Some households have since returned to the pits or reopened them as guesthouses, and the village now lives substantially on tourism.

Matmata belongs to the Amazigh south. The Berber language survives here and in the villages around, alongside Tunisian Arabic, and older people in particular still use it at home; in nearby Tamezret it is more widely spoken. Identity is tied to the hills, to a particular house and pit, and to an extended family, and many people who now live in Gabès or Tunis keep a claim on the family dwelling and return for holidays and funerals.

Domestic craft follows the materials at hand: wool woven on ground looms into blankets and the heavy striped cloth used for cloaks, clay jars for oil, grain and water, palm fronds turned into baskets and mats, and olive wood worked into tools. Households still keep the great storage chambers that once held a year's barley and oil, and the making of tabouna bread in a clay oven remains an everyday skill rather than a demonstration.

Visitors have been part of village life for decades, and the relationship is practical: households charge a small sum to show their courtyards, and film tourism is treated as a straightforward trade rather than a source of local pride. Away from the few open houses, Matmata is a conservative, quiet place where families keep to themselves, and greetings, patience and asking before photographing go a long way.

The old village counted about 2,100 residents at the 2004 census, and Nouvelle Matmata, down on the plateau, has since become the larger settlement. Perhaps a few dozen families still occupy pit houses year-round; more live in concrete houses on the surface and use an inherited pit for storage or as a guesthouse. Households are often split between the village and the cities, with money sent home from Gabès, Tunis, France or the Gulf.

The local economy is thin. Olives, figs, barley, sheep and goats support subsistence farming on terraces held together by dry-stone walls, and the rest comes from tourism: guesthouses, cafés, craft stalls, guiding and the coaches that come up from Djerba and Gabès for a few hours. That income is seasonal and has collapsed for years at a time after security incidents elsewhere in the country, and unemployment among the young is high.

Water and erosion are constant concerns: rain is rare but arrives hard, cutting gullies in the hills and, in bad years, damaging pit walls, and the terraces need repair after every storm. Days start early and slow through the afternoon, with men gathering in the cafés on the main street in the evening and family life underground, out of the sun and the wind.

Cooking here is the plain food of the dry south, made from what keeps through a year with little rain. Barley and semolina are the base: couscous steamed over lamb or vegetables, and bazin or thick barley porridges dressed with olive oil. Tabouna bread, slapped onto the inside wall of a clay oven and peeled off when it blisters, is baked at home and eaten with oil, olives, harissa and fresh cheese.

Lamb and goat are the festive meats, roasted or stewed slowly with tomato and chilli, and kadid — meat salted, spiced and air-dried — extends the supply through the year and is cooked into couscous. Eggs, chickpeas and the national staples appear everywhere: chorba broth, brik pastry parcels, mechouia salad of grilled peppers and tomatoes, and lablabi, a chickpea soup poured over torn bread, eaten early in the day.

Olives and olive oil from the terraces are the local pride, along with figs, almonds and dates brought from the oases to the west. Sweets are simple — semolina and date pastries, honey and almonds — and mint tea, boiled over coals and poured from a height into small glasses, with pine nuts or roasted almonds floating on top, is drunk throughout the day and offered to every guest.