Ksar Ouled Soltane — fortress
Ian Sewell · CC BY 2.5

Ksar Ouled Soltane

  • 1 min read
  • 32.789° N 10.515° E

Interesting facts

  • The 2011 twenty-dinar banknote shows the ksar alongside a portrait of the 19th-century reformer Kheireddine Pasha.
  • The word ghorfa simply means "room" in Arabic; each barrel-vaulted cell has a single door and once stored grain, dates and other food.
  • Southern Tunisia once had about 6,000 ghorfas, and many disappeared after independence as the region's rural economy declined.
  • The Phantom Menace combined ghorfas from several southern Tunisian sites, including Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Hadada, to create Mos Espa.
  • Collective granaries of this type in southern Tunisia and Libya's Nafusa Mountains are generally traced back to the 14th century.
  • Since the restoration that began in 1993, the ghorfas of Ouled Soltane no longer have doors.

Why it is worth it

Ksar Ouled Soltane is a fortified granary on a hilltop in the far south of Tunisia, and one of the most striking of the region's ksour. Its courtyards are walled in by rows of ghorfas, barrel-vaulted storage cells stacked three and four storeys high so that the facades look like honeycombs of rounded arches. Steep outside staircases cling to the masonry, and wooden hooks still project above the upper doors, once used to haul goods up into the cells. These stairs and hooks set it apart from other ksour in the country.

The ksar was built by the Berber communities of the area to keep their harvests safe, and its hilltop site made it easy to defend. Its rectangular core measures about sixty by forty metres and has a single entrance. Kamel Laroussi dates the earliest construction to 1699; an eastern extension around an outer courtyard followed before the French protectorate was established in 1881. In all there are 287 ghorfas, 96 of them around the outer court. The whole complex was restored from 1993 onward.

The ksar has become an emblem of southern Tunisia. It appeared on the twenty-dinar banknote issued in 2011, and in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace it served as the slave quarters of Mos Espa, where the young Anakin Skywalker grows up. In 2020 Tunisia placed it among the ksour and troglodyte dwellings of the south on its tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage, and in 2021 it was formally classified as a national monument.

Tataouine, the nearest town, is the capital of the governorate of the same name, in the dry south-east of the country.

Getting there

The ksar stands about 17 km from Tataouine, near the villages of Tazeghdanet, Techout and Beni Oussine. The nearest airport is Djerba–Zarzis International Airport (DJE), about 123 km away.

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From the encyclopaedia

Ksar Ouled Soltane is a fortified granary, or ksar, located in the Tataouine district in southern Tunisia. The ksar is spread out over two courtyards, each of which has a perimeter of multi-story vaulted granary cellars, or ghorfas. Like other ksour built by Berber communities Ksar Ouled Soltane, is located on a hilltop, to help protect it from raiding parties in previous centuries. Kamel Laroussi dates its earliest construction to 1699.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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