You Can Stay The Night In Luke Skywalker’s Childhood Home
While we wait in anxious hope that the new Star Wars film will be worth the wait – spare us a Jar Jar Binks-like character please! – super fans can delight in the fact that the infamous Lars Homestead from Star Wars VI: A New Hope has been turned into a hotel, and you can totally stay there.
You may remember some pivotal scenes in the first ever released Star Wars film that tracked a soon-to-be Jedi by the name of Luke Skywalker who lived with his aunt and uncle on Tatooine, in that galaxy far, far away. Actually, the Hotel Sidi Driss is actually a lot closer than you think.
The hotel is located in a tiny Berber-speaking town of Matmâta in southern Tunisia, and since George Lucas used their underground labyrinth as the subterranean home of Luke Skywalker, fans have flocked to this small desert settlement to soak up a part of cinema history.
The area is home to a number of troglodyte structures, built by digging elaborate pits in the ground which are turned into vaulted rooms and are usually connected by tunnel passageways. The area was used by George Lucas and his crew to create the desert world of Tatooine – Lucas reportedly felt the area’s landscape and desolate habitat felt more like an alien planet than something found here on earth.
The hotel, which has since been nicknamed the Star Wars Hotel, fell into relative obscurity after filming finished in 1976, but was revamped in 2000 for filming for Star Wars II: Attack Of The Clones. The same sets were re-decorated for Anakin Skywalker’s scenes visiting Tatooine, and since the popularity of the films brought new fans to the Star Wars universe, the decorations probably won’t be taken down anytime soon.
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Visitors of the hotel can stay in four of the five pits, with the fifth being turned into the hotel’s restaurant. The rooms are caves, so be prepared for a window-less yet remarkably unique experience. The rooms have been restored by Star Wars fan Philip Vanni in 1995 who scratched away the limestone and drawing the exact designs found in the original film.
Pack up your lightsaber and get ready to be blasted into a real-life galaxy far, far away – the Hotel Sidi Driss is around $24AUD a night, so there’s really nothing stopping you from getting your geek on.
Start planning your Star Wars journey with Qantas flights to Africa.
