ON SCREEN
Ouallywood: The Film History of Aït Benhaddou
From Lawrence of Arabia to Game of Thrones — why this earthen ksar and the studios of nearby Ouarzazate became one of world cinema's favourite stand-in deserts.
See Aït Benhaddou trips on GetYourGuide ↗A landscape built for epics
Ouarzazate and the country around it — bare mountains, red earth, a fortified ksar that looks like nowhere else on a film budget — caught the eye of director David Lean while scouting locations for Lawrence of Arabia in the early 1960s. The region offered what a studio backlot couldn't: real desert light, real earthen architecture, and enough open, empty terrain to stand in for Arabia, ancient Rome, or the Holy Land depending on the script. That first production effectively put the area on the industry's map, and it never really left.
The early wave
Through the 1960s and 70s, more productions followed Lean's lead into the region. Aït Benhaddou itself — already a striking, ready-made fortified backdrop — appeared in Sodom and Gomorrah and later in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King (1975), filmed partly around the ksar and partly at Ouarzazate and nearby gorges. Each production that came through left behind local crews, drivers and fixers with film experience, gradually building the infrastructure — and reputation — that would let the area compete for much bigger productions later on. Word of mouth among location scouts did the rest, cementing the region's reputation years before any dedicated studio was built there.
Ouallywood is born
That growing infrastructure crystallised in 1983 with the opening of Atlas Corporation Studios just outside Ouarzazate — now among the largest film studios in the world by land area — followed later by CLA Studios nearby. Between them, and the surrounding natural locations including Aït Benhaddou, the town earned its nickname: Ouallywood. Sets built for one historical epic are often adapted and reused for the next, which is part of why the same stretch of desert keeps turning up as ancient Egypt, Jerusalem, Rome and Tibet in different films decades apart.
The blockbuster years
From the 1990s on, the studios and the ksar hosted an increasingly big-budget list: The Mummy, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Alexander, Babel, Prince of Persia and The Passion of the Christ all shot scenes in or around Ouarzazate, several of them using Aït Benhaddou's kasbahs and lanes directly as backdrop or set dressing. Gladiator's Zucchabar sequences and Kingdom of Heaven's Jerusalem exteriors are among the productions most closely associated with the ksar itself, rather than the purpose-built studio lots nearby. For visitors today, working out which lane or wall belongs to which film has become something of a game, even if guides don't always agree on the exact spot.
Yunkai, and a new generation of fans
Aït Benhaddou reached a new audience in 2013, when HBO's Game of Thrones used the ksar as Yunkai, one of the slave cities of Slaver's Bay, in its third season. For a site whose real history includes centuries as a caravan-route stronghold on trade routes that carried enslaved people north, the fictional slave city built on its walls is an odd echo of the actual past — and it introduced Aït Benhaddou to a generation of travellers who'd never heard of Lawrence of Arabia. The show's producers were drawn to much the same qualities that attracted filmmakers half a century earlier: a landscape that needs almost no set dressing to look otherworldly.
Spotting the locations today
Guides leading tours through the ksar and around Ouarzazate will often point out where specific scenes were shot, and the CLA and Atlas studio lots (bookable separately, and not affiliated with any specific film's rights holder) still display leftover sets from past productions. None of this is run by the film studios themselves at the ksar — Aït Benhaddou remains a lived-in UNESCO site first, its cinema history a very visible layer on top. Worth setting expectations accordingly: this is a working heritage site with a rich sideline in cinema, not a theme park built around any one franchise, and the film trivia is best treated as one more layer of an already layered place.