Matmata’s Underground Homes in Tunisia and Their Star Wars Connection

Craters cover this desert.

Each one hides a home, and one is famous.

From the road, Matmata in southern Tunisia looks almost

empty.

Where is everyone?

They live down there, around pits dug up to thirty feet into the

ground.

Rooms are carved into the walls, some on two

floors with tunnels between pits.

In summer, the desert above can pass one hundred

and twenty degrees

Fahrenheit.

Down in these rooms, it can be twenty-seven degrees cooler

with no machines.

Even the paths run over these rooms.

You can walk across a home without seeing it.

Then, in the late '60s, heavy rain flooded the

pits, and many homes collapsed.

Still, some families stayed underground, even with new houses

on the surface.

Years later, one of these homes became Luke Skywalker's

house in Star

Wars.

Yet no record shows when the first pit was dug or who first chose to

live underground.

Would you trade your house for a home thirty feet below the desert?