Can you do a film-location tour in Morocco around the Ouarzazate studios?

Ouarzazate has been nicknamed "Ouallywood" for good reason, and a film-location tour here is one of my favourite days to design for anyone who loves cinema. The town sits on the desert side of the High Atlas and has hosted feature films for more than half a century, drawn by the clarity of the light, the dramatic earthen landscapes and the sheer reliability of the weather. Two studios anchor the visit: Atlas Studios, the older and larger of the two, and CLA Studios just outside town. Both run guided tours where you walk among standing sets — Roman temples, Egyptian palace facades, Tibetan monasteries, aircraft fuselages — left behind by productions that used them.

What makes the day work is pairing the studios with the real locations nearby. Twenty minutes from Ouarzazate is Ait Ben Haddou, a UNESCO-listed ksar of stacked mud-brick kasbahs that has appeared in an extraordinary number of films. Walking up through its alleys to the granary at the top, you keep recognising angles you have seen on screen without ever quite placing them. The contrast between the constructed sets at the studios and a genuine thousand-year-old village that needs no set dressing at all is the heart of why this tour lands so well.

I am always honest with guests about what the studio tours are and are not. They are working facilities, not polished theme parks, so the experience is more "behind the scenes of a real backlot" than a slick attraction — sets weather, some are dismantled between productions, and what you see depends partly on what is currently filming. That rawness is exactly what film fans tend to love. A local guide who knows which scene was shot where transforms a wander among props into a proper story, so this is one tour where the guiding genuinely matters.

Logistically, Ouarzazate fits beautifully into the classic Marrakech-to-Sahara route, since you cross the Tizi n'Tichka pass and pass Ait Ben Haddou anyway en route to the dunes. I usually build it as a two-day stop: arrive over the Atlas, see Ait Ben Haddou in the late-afternoon light when the mud-brick glows, overnight nearby, then do the studios the next morning before continuing to the desert or looping back. It turns a transit town that many tours rush through into a real highlight.