Agrabah was actually Wadi Rum
When Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake of Aladdin opened in May 2019, it grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. What the marketing didn’t emphasize — but what anyone familiar with Wadi Rum would immediately recognize — is that the outdoor sequences depicting the fictional city of Agrabah and its surrounding desert were filmed almost entirely in Jordan’s Wadi Rum protected area.
This is not surprising if you know the production history of films in this landscape. Wadi Rum has been playing “desert that is not quite of this world” on screen for sixty years. What is slightly surprising is how faithfully the production captured the specific visual qualities of a landscape that genuinely looks like a production designer’s concept art: red sand, vertical sandstone formations, the particular quality of late afternoon light that turns everything amber and purple.
If you’ve been to Wadi Rum and then watched Aladdin — or watched Aladdin and then gone to Wadi Rum — the recognition is immediate and slightly vertiginous, like seeing your hometown on television.
Which locations were used
The Wadi Rum Protected Area is an 720-square-kilometer desert wilderness managed by the Jordan Tourism Board and accessible only with a registered guide and permit. The Aladdin production used several specific locations within the protected area.
The Cave of Wonders entrance sequence: The dramatic sand dune sequences — where Aladdin enters the Cave of Wonders — were filmed against the massive dune system near the Um Sabatah area of Wadi Rum. These are not the tallest dunes in the desert (the famous red dunes near Jebel Khazali are more photographically striking) but they provided the scale and color the production needed.
The marketplace sequences: While much of the Agrabah marketplace was shot on a constructed set in Longcross Studios in the UK, the aerial establishing shots — showing the city sitting in a vast desert landscape — are Wadi Rum, with the distinctive flat-topped formations of Jebel Rum and Jebel Khazali visible in wider shots.
The magic carpet flight sequences: The visual effects artists used Wadi Rum’s landscape as the reference geography for the magic carpet flight scenes. While the flight itself is obviously composited, the ground terrain visible in those sequences — the shadow-striped sand, the red formations — is based on aerial footage of the actual desert.
The lineage: why Wadi Rum keeps appearing in films
Aladdin (2019) sits in a long tradition of film productions that have used Wadi Rum’s unique geography as a stand-in for places that don’t exist or don’t have accessible filming locations.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962): The original. David Lean’s seven Oscar-winning epic used Wadi Rum for the Wadi Rum sequences (appropriately) and for much of the Arabian Peninsula geography. T.E. Lawrence himself described Wadi Rum as “vast and echoing and God-like” — which is also a reasonable description of Lean’s cinematography.
The Martian (2015): Ridley Scott filmed the Mars surface sequences in Wadi Rum, recognizing that no other terrestrial location matches the red-desert-with-vertical-formations aesthetic of Mars as seen in orbital photography. The film was one of the catalysts for a new generation of visitors arriving in Wadi Rum specifically because they recognized it from the film.
Dune (2021) and Dune Part Two (2024): Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel uses Wadi Rum for the Arrakis desert planet sequences. The visual comparison to Lawrence of Arabia is deliberate — Herbert drew partly on Lawrence’s account of Arabia when writing Arrakis, and Villeneuve chose to film where Lawrence had filmed. The Dune productions are the most technically sophisticated use of the landscape to date, making extensive use of both drone aerial footage and ground-level shooting that emphasizes the scale of the formations.
Rogue One (2016): The Jedha sequences — a desert moon occupied by Imperial forces — use Wadi Rum material, though this is less widely known than the Dune and Martian connections.
Film tourism in Wadi Rum: what the ROVE project is doing
Jordan’s tourism authority has recognized, over the past decade, that film locations create a specific and highly motivated category of visitor. The ROVE (Royal Organization for film and TV production in Jordan) project, launched by Jordan’s Royal Film Commission, actively coordinates between productions and works to develop film tourism infrastructure.
What this means in practice: several of the Wadi Rum camps and tour operators now offer “film location tours” that specifically visit the sites used in Lawrence of Arabia, Dune, The Martian, and Aladdin. These combine the standard jeep tour format with location identification — stopping at a dune and explaining which sequence was filmed there, at a canyon and noting which tent was pitched here for the cast.
We did one of these tours in 2022 and found it genuinely well-informed. The guide had worked as a location fixer during the Dune production and could point to specific details: the particular formation that served as a camera reference point in a specific scene; the area where the catering tents had been set up; the morning light angle that a particular shot had been designed around.
Getting there: from Aqaba or Petra
Wadi Rum is easily accessible as a day trip or overnight from either Aqaba (1 hour by car) or Petra/Wadi Musa (1 hour 45 minutes). For the full film location experience, an overnight stay gives you sunset and sunrise in the landscape — the light conditions that actually match the film sequences, which were almost universally shot in the golden hours.
Day trips from Aqaba are also feasible — a 6-hour jeep tour gives you enough time to cover the main formations. The film locations are generally included in standard tour routes because they coincide with the most visually dramatic areas of the protected reserve.
From Wadi Rum: jeep tour with overnight desert camping Wadi Rum: full day jeep tourThe honest tourism angle
There’s something slightly self-conscious about recommending a place because a film made it look good. Wadi Rum deserves to be visited on its own terms: it’s one of the most extraordinary desert landscapes on earth, with geological formations that took 500 million years to create and a human history (Nabataean inscriptions, Bedouin heritage) that goes back millennia.
But if the Aladdin magic carpet sequences, or the Arrakis spice dunes of Dune, or the red Martian surface of Ridley Scott’s film are what first made you curious about this place — that’s a perfectly legitimate entry point. The landscape that makes Wadi Rum so filmable is the same landscape that makes it worth an overnight stay in a Bedouin camp, watching the Milky Way from the same sand that has been red for half a billion years.
The Aladdin Agrabah is a fiction. The desert is real.
For full Wadi Rum logistics — camp options, jeep tour providers, getting in and out — see /destinations/wadi-rum/. For how to combine Wadi Rum with Petra and Aqaba in a single itinerary, the 7-day Jordan itinerary has all the connections.