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  Tunisia / Cities and Towns /
Matmata
Arabic: matmāta
Village in Tunisia with about 5,000 inhabitants.
Matmata has many of the best examples of troglodyte architecture in the world: vertical caves dug by man into soft sandstone, usually formed as a circle, with doors and rooms dug in from the vertical walls.
This type of architecture has a couple of parallels elsewhere in North Africa- in Morocco, Libya, and elsewhere in Tunisia, but no place is endowed with so many examples as Matmata.
There are more than 100 dwellings of this kind, but they have since long been outnumbered by normal houses placed over the ground.
The population of Matmata is Berber, and it is believed that Matmata has been populated for about 700 years, though there are no remaining constructions remotely as old as this.
The softness of the mountain is both the reason for troglodytes being possible, and for troglodytes never becoming very old.
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