Tozeur is a Saharan oasis of southwestern Tunisia, set on the southern edge of the Chott el Djerid salt lake at the meeting point of the Saharan, Algerian, and Tunisian-littoral spheres. The Roman-period Tusurus preceded the medieval town; the modern Tozeur preserves the same root with the regular phonological adjustment.
The oasis covers approximately ten thousand hectares of palm grove fed by some two hundred natural springs, organised across a long history into a sophisticated hydraulic system. The medieval Berber engineer Ibn Chabbat codified the seasonal water-allocation system of the Tozeur palmeraie in the thirteenth century; his treatise governs the cooperative water management of the oasis in substantially modified but recognisable form to the present day.
The historic medina of Tozeur, the Ouled el Hadef, is one of the principal examples of late-medieval southern Tunisian urbanism. Its distinctive yellow-brick architecture — geometrically patterned facades constructed in raised brick relief — is among the most distinctive vernacular traditions of north Africa. The brick designs draw extensively on Berber textile and tattoo motifs, marking the broader Berber substrate of the southern Tunisian craft economy.
The Berber language of the Djerid — closely related to the surviving Djerbi varieties — is severely endangered in the Tozeur oasis, with daily speech overwhelmingly Tunisian Arabic. The contemporary economy combines date cultivation (the deglet noor variety, principally exported to Europe), oasis vegetable production, and tourism around the medina, the Chott el Djerid, and the western Tunisian Saharan landscape (used as a Star Wars filming location across multiple installments of the franchise).