This week’s dream: the breathtaking beauty of southern Tunisia

Set in a “breathtaking” landscape of sand dunes, desert oases and vast salt lakes, the fortified villages of southern Tunisia have a stark, otherworldly beauty, which inspired their use as locations in the Star Wars films. Tourism in the region all but died off in the wake of the country’s 2011 revolution and the terrorist attack of 2015. But last year, the Foreign Office lifted its advice against travel there, says Harry Johnstone in the FT – and it’s well worth joining the “trickle” of visitors now returning. Start with a trip to Djerba, an island off Tunisia’s southeast coast thought to feature in Homer’s Odyssey as the land of the lotus eaters. Linked to the mainland by a bridge originally built by the Romans, Djerba has good beaches and a beautiful old town, Houmt Souk – home to a Jewish community whose roots are said to date back to the sixth century BC.

From there, a road winds south through palm groves and the desert to Ksar Ouled Soltane, the first of the region’s fortified villages, which were built by Berbers hundreds of years ago to defend against marauding Arab horsemen. Its “extraordinary” ghorfas, or fortified granaries, resemble “hobbit homes”: courtyards of little stone warehouses, stacked up to four storeys high.

Chenini, Douiret and Guermassa were all originally cave settlements; today, they’re dominated by “blinding white” mosques. Eighty families still live in Chenini; the other two are ghost towns. Ksar Ghilane, on the edge of the Sahara, is more populous. It’s a good base for desert tourism, including camel treks to the nearby Roman fort of Tisavar and visits to Chott el Djerid, an enormous salt flat. “The usual boundaries of space and time” seem to collapse as you walk out onto this 3,000 sq mile expanse of “sparkling white crust”, inducing “a surreal sense of smallness and isolation”. Tour operators in the area include Sahha Sahara (sahhasahara. com) and Autre Tunisie (autretunisie.com).