Yuma

Instead of returning to Tunisia, the filmmakers decided to stay closer to home and go to the sand dunes around Yuma for making Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. Buttercup Valley, California was the filming site for the Great Pit of Carkoon sequence on the Dune Sea. Filming took place in April 1982, though construction had taken place over the previous five months. The crew stayed in the nearest town, Yuma, Arizona, while filming, logging over 5,500 man-days in hotel rooms for set construction and filming.

For A New Hope Special Edition, the crew returned to the Imperial Sand Dunes to film additional shots of stormtroopers searching for traces of R2-D2 crash landing his escape pod.

Text and facts from the “Yuma” article on Wookieepedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified for this site.