Aït Benhaddou

Where it sits. Aït Benhaddou rises from the bank of the Asif Ounila, about 30 kilometres northwest of Ouarzazate on the old road toward the Tizi n'Tichka pass and Marrakesh. The ksar is a stacked mass of earth buildings climbing a conical hill to a fortified granary on the summit, perhaps 30 metres above the riverbed. The modern village, the road, the cafes and the car parks are on the opposite bank; the historic settlement is reached by crossing the river, which for most of the year is a braid of shallow channels over gravel. A concrete footbridge installed in the early 2010s replaced the sandbags and stepping stones that visitors used before, and it is a genuine improvement in flood season.

What it is made of. The ksar is built almost entirely of earth. Walls are pisé, damp soil mixed with straw and lime and rammed in timber shuttering in courses, with adobe brick above and a render of the same material over everything. Towers taper as they rise and carry incised geometric decoration cut into the render, a vocabulary shared across the pre-Saharan valleys. Roofs are laid on palm and poplar beams with reed matting and packed earth. Inside the walls are around fifty dwellings, several of them substantial kasbahs with corner towers, arranged along steep lanes and stairways that narrow toward the summit. The agadir at the top, a collective granary, is now a roofless shell but it commands the whole valley.

Why it was built here. The Ounila valley carried one of the main caravan routes between the Sahara and Marrakesh, running from the Draa and the Tafilalt over the Atlas by way of Telouet. A fortified settlement at this point controlled a river crossing on that route. Most of the standing fabric is seventeenth-century or later, though the site itself is far older and occupation of the valley long predates the present buildings. In the early twentieth century the whole corridor fell under the control of the Glaoui family, who taxed the traffic from their kasbah at Telouet. When the modern road was cut over the Tizi n'Tichka in the 1930s the route through the Ounila lost its purpose, and the ksar began emptying.

On screen. Aït Benhaddou is among the most filmed locations in Africa. Productions have used it since the 1960s, with Lawrence of Arabia among the early ones and a long line following: The Man Who Would Be King, Jesus of Nazareth, The Living Daylights, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Mummy, Alexander, Kingdom of Heaven, Prince of Persia and many more. Gladiator used the ksar in 2000 for the North African town of Zucchabar, where the enslaved Maximus is bought and first fights, with the arena for those sequences built separately on open ground outside Ouarzazate. In 2013 the third season of Game of Thrones filmed here for the slaver city of Yunkai, the walls and gate seen when Daenerys camps outside; the neighbouring city of Astapor was shot at Essaouira on the Atlantic coast.

What is authentic and what is not. This matters here more than at most heritage sites. Earth architecture survives only through constant maintenance, and when families left for the new village across the river much of the ksar began dissolving in the winter rains. Some buildings have been consolidated under the site's UNESCO World Heritage inscription, granted in 1987; others were repaired, extended or re-rendered for particular productions, and film crews have added and removed structures over decades. Cement has been used in places where it traps moisture and damages the earth beneath, a practice conservators criticise. A handful of families still live inside the walls; the rest of the ksar is a mixture of consolidated ruin, restored facade and shop, with jewellery stalls, painters selling indigo-and-saffron work and a few cafes occupying rooms that were dwellings within living memory. None of this makes the place inauthentic, but it does mean that the ksar seen today is the product of continuous intervention rather than of undisturbed survival.

Getting there and timing. Grands taxis run from Ouarzazate in about 40 minutes, and every tour crossing the Atlas stops here, which means the site is busiest from mid-morning to late afternoon. Staying overnight in the modern village is the way to have the lanes to yourself at first light, when the low sun turns the earth walls the colour of apricot and the shadows of the towers fall across the riverbed. March to May and September to November are the best months; summer midday heat on the unshaded climb is severe and winter nights drop close to freezing. The climb to the granary is steep, uneven and stepped throughout, with no handrails.