Ait Benhaddou and Ouarzazate

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We woke up to beautiful clear skies and a view of the snow covered mountains in the High Atlas.

Our first stop was Ait Benhaddou, a picturesque village that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, best known for featuring in numerous films including Gladiator, though for that film was there significant enhancement of the site by the use of CGI. By arriving early we managed to avoid the crowds, as we walked through the outer wall and then up narrow passageways between ochre coloured buildings. We were taken round one Berber home, which had a small pen to keep the sheep in, as well as storage space for their hay. The unlit original kitchen with an open fire sat next to a more modern kitchen with at least some mod cons. The village nestles at the base of a fortified hill, at the top of which was a ruined keep and watch tower. Just outside the village they were building a small amphitheatre which was due to be used for filming Gladiator 2.

Half an hour’s drive took us to the Atlas film studios at Ouarzazate, the centre of international film making in Morocco, where we enjoyed an hour’s tour of some of the sets. There were indoor and outdoor Egyptian sets, mixed in with Roman and Greek sets. One set featured a street which had taken 3 months to build, for about one minute’s filming of a Brazilian drama called Jezebel. No wonder films are expensive to make! A few hundred yards away was the set they are building for a complete town in Gladiator 2.

We then had a short walk round the Taourirt Kasbah, Ouarzazate’s only historic building, as the town had little of significance before the construction of a French Foreign Legion fort in 1928, and then the arrival of the film studios which support the local economy. It was now pretty hot so we headed to our riad hotel, where we happily spent the rest of the day reading by the pool.

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