Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened on July 17, 2026 and delivered the biggest opening weekend of his career: over 264 million dollars worldwide in three days. Audiences are now doing what audiences do after a Nolan epic shot on location: looking up where it was filmed and planning trips.
Here is the part most articles miss. The film’s most spectacular set, Troy itself, was built in Morocco at Ait Ben Haddou, a UNESCO World Heritage kasbah that happens to sit on the classic road from Marrakech to the Sahara. Which means you can drive the film route, walk through the village that played Troy, visit the studios where half of Hollywood’s ancient world was shot, and finish the journey somewhere no film set can imitate: the open dunes of Erg Chegaga.
This is that itinerary.
Where The Odyssey Was Filmed in Morocco
Nolan’s production spent the opening weeks of its 91-day shoot in Morocco, starting in late February 2025. The verified Moroccan locations:
Ait Ben Haddou played Troy. The production built roughly sixty additional structures across the site, including city gates and a Temple of Athena, for the fall-of-Troy sequences. The ancient ksar’s earthen towers needed little help to look three thousand years old: they are the real thing, continuously inhabited and protected by UNESCO since 1987.
Essaouira’s Atlantic beaches hosted the Trojan Horse discovery scene and boat work, with Matt Damon’s Odysseus on the sand.
Tahanaout and the Marrakech region provided additional city scenes.
The rest of the odyssey scattered across the Mediterranean and beyond: Sicily’s Egadi Islands for Ithaca, Greece’s Peloponnese for the Cyclops coast and Nestor’s palace, Scotland for Circe, Iceland’s black sands for Hades.
But the road trip that actually works as a holiday, the one with the film’s greatest set on it, is the Moroccan one.
The Route: Marrakech to Erg Chegaga, Through Troy
This is the southern circuit we drive with our guests, around 450 kilometres from Marrakech to M’Hamid El Ghizlane, then off-road into the dunes. Done well, it is a two-day journey that feels like crossing several worlds.
Stage 1: Marrakech to Ait Ben Haddou (3.5 to 4 hours)
You leave Marrakech and climb the Tizi n’Tichka pass, at 2,260 metres the highest major road pass in North Africa. The landscape flips from olive groves to bare high-mountain rock, then descends into the pre-Saharan south. A short detour off the N9 brings you to Ait Ben Haddou.
Give it two hours minimum. Cross the river, climb through the lanes to the granary at the top, and you are standing where Ridley Scott sold Maximus into slavery in Gladiator, where Daenerys took Yunkai in Game of Thrones season three, and where, most recently, Nolan staged the fall of Troy. Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, Prince of Persia, Babel and Alexander all shot here too. There is no other village on Earth with that filmography.
Stage 2: Ouarzazate and Atlas Studios (40 minutes on)
Half an hour down the road, Ouarzazate is Morocco’s film capital. Atlas Studios, founded in 1983, is often called the largest film studio in the world by land area, and its standing desert sets are open to visitors: Egyptian temples from The Mummy, sets from Kingdom of Heaven, Kundun and Black Hawk Down baking quietly in the sun. It is a strange, wonderful place, half backlot, half ruin.
Stage 3: The Draa Valley to Zagora (2.5 hours)
South of Ouarzazate the road crosses the Anti-Atlas at Agdz and enters the Draa Valley, a ribbon of some three million date palms running between desert plateaus, punctuated by kasbahs that no studio ever needed to dress. This stretch is the quiet star of the drive.
Stage 4: Zagora to M’Hamid, then the dunes (3 hours to camp)
At M’Hamid El Ghizlane the paved road ends. From there it is 4x4 only, about 90 minutes off-piste to Erg Chegaga, the wildest great erg in Morocco. No fixed road, no cell signal, no set dressing.
This is the point of the whole journey. The Odyssey is a story about a man trying to get home across a vast, indifferent, magnificent emptiness. You can visit the sets. But the feeling the film chases, the smallness under an enormous sky, the silence, the stars Odysseus navigated by, that is not at Ait Ben Haddou. It is out here.
Nights That No Film Can Show You
Erg Chegaga has Bortle Class 1 skies, the darkest rating that exists. At Umnya Desert Camp we end the film route the way it deserves: dinner by the fire, Berber musicians, and a telescope session under the same constellations Homer’s sailors steered by, roughly 3,000 years of navigation unchanged.
Our guests do the full route with private 4x4 transfers from Marrakech, with the Ait Ben Haddou and Atlas Studios stops built in on request. Two days down, as many nights in the desert as you can give it, and the drive back north through the same landscapes at a different hour of light.
Practical notes
- Best season: September to June. October, November, March and April are ideal for the drive.
- The Ait Ben Haddou stop adds about two hours; Atlas Studios about ninety minutes.
- Bring a printed photo of your favourite film scene: finding the exact spot is half the fun.
- The camp is all-inclusive from Marrakech, so the film route can simply be your transfer day done properly.
The Odyssey ends with a homecoming. Yours ends with the opposite, and that is rather the point: a night far from everything, in the one location Hollywood keeps coming back to because it cannot be built.
Want the whole route done for you? Our Sahara Film Route Retreat packages exactly this journey: 6 days from Marrakech with a night facing Ait Ben Haddou, a private guided film locations tour, then four nights of yoga, Pilates, nomad culture and stargazing at the camp, 3,450 euros all-inclusive.
