You won't find the village of Mos Espa on any map of Tunisia, but it's there all right. It lies about 300 miles south-east of the capital, Tunis, six miles west of National Route 3, along a dirt road that is in places covered by the shifting sands.

Mos Espa has a name only in fiction. It's the space port on the planet Tatooine in the film Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. But its existence is a fact, albeit one that might never be acknowledged by the cartographers.

It's a village with the appearance of stone but all the solidity of papier-mâché, its one street surrounded by miles of 100ft golden sand-dunes.

The dunes and rocky landscape of the Sahara have been a backdrop in numerous films, from The English Patient and Indiana Jones to Jesus of Nazareth. As a setting, they have the advantage of combining wild scenery with easy accessibility. The site of Mos Espa, for example, is only 20 miles south of the bustling desert town of Tozeur - which has an airport - and six miles north of Nefta, a more relaxed settlement with its own spectacular date palm plantation fed by natural springs

The film-makers' stay is generally short. They arrive, create a world, shoot it and dismantle it. CTV, the Tunisian Film bureau, ensures that they leave few signs of their presence on the landscape. That Mos Espa is still standing is due to the popularity of the Star Wars films (known locally as La Guerre d' Etoile and what the Tunisian tourist board sees as an opportunity for business.

Given the enormous scale of the production, the surprise is that there is not more left to see. Just two years ago George Lucas and his Hollywood army of 500 built the sets and filmed here. Everything, apart from sand, was bussed in by truck in temperatures reaching 120 degrees. A route was carved out of the crusty landscape for delivery of equipment, building supplies food and water.

In the film Jedi knights free Anakin Skywalker from the clutches of his evil slave master, Watto, a duck-footed, pot-bellied scrap dealer who runs a spare parts service in Mos Espa for visiting space craft. Life imitates fiction in the person of Kamel Souilah, 38 years old, Nefta resident and scrap merchant. He is cleaner and nimbler than Watto, but he does have a ready supply of spare parts for visiting Star Fleet enthusiasts.

Kamel has an agreement with the CTV to cart away the tons of discarded set and props that visiting film crews leave behind. All around his home on the edge of Nefta lies booty from film productions: aircraft engines, sections of old starship cockpits, missile heads, robots, and no end of electronic paraphernalia.

After Lucas and his army left, it took Kamel three weeks to "clean the desert" with 20 helpers and some heavy lifting machinery. He hopes now to clean up financially among collectors of memorabilia and visiting film fans.

Tunisia is not short of tourist attractions - in the south there is the strange underground world of the troglodyte people of Matmata (recognizable to film buffs as Luke Skywalker's home in the original Star Wars film), but Mos Espa is the hot destination of the moment. There is even a Star Wars safari tour coach that can speed you around the sets in air-conditioned comfort.

While I was in the country last month French tourists from the nearby Tozeur Club Med resort were preparing to spend the night at Mos Espa camped out under the stars. I preferred to spend the evenings outside Kamel's shop in the old city of Nefta, where the local men were happy to share their stories of how La Guerre d'Etoile came to their town in the desert, and how some of it still sits in Kamel's front garden.

Extract from British newspaper article in The Daily Telegraph, Travel - In Focus, Saturday July 24, 1999

View the original article (475 kb)