A door in the rock.
Behind it: 1,000 years.

The door is small. It looks like every other door in Tamezret — an old wooden door, set into a mud wall, in an alley, in a village that most maps have forgotten. No sign. No number. You search, you find, you knock — and suddenly you are standing inside one of the most extraordinary houses in North Africa.

A houch carved from rock

Tamezret means Ath Mizret in Berber — "children of Mizret". The village sits in the Matmata Mountains, twelve kilometres west of Matmata, fifty kilometres from Gabès. On the way here, you pass no hotels. No souvenir market. Only rock, olive trees and silence.