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700 people living here. I remember when the film crew came in 1977 to film Jesus of Nazareth. I was 13 and I remember seeing Franco Zeffirelli working on the film. Since then, we have had many more visitors and every year there has been film crews coming here."

Abdul walks with us as we enter through the gates. We are instantly confronted by a maze of winding, narrow streets. "Don't worry," Abdul tells us. "It is easy to find your way around and I can help you. I know where you can find excellent shops." I pull our map from my bag and we start navigating our way into the city. "I feel like I'm in The Life of Brian," I tell the others. I half expect Abdul to tell me the Pythons had chosen Ait Benhaddou as one of the film's locations.

Abdul takes us to various shops within the city selling leather goods and cheap silver jewellery. In the tourist areas of Morocco, Tradesmen pay friendly locals to guide the tourists to their shops and I see this is also Abdul's intention. I decide to overlook this since he was giving us plenty of good background information on Ait Benhaddou. Abdul leaves us at the market, probably to search for more tourists and we set off to explore the city with just our map to rely on.

The place feels ancient. We turn a corner and find a donkey standing in the dusty street and as we wander down tight alleyways women in Islamic headdress shuffle past us. Where the sun brakes through the jungle of towers, fruit has been hung up to dry. We pass many Kasbahs each with its own resident family and take some time to admire the town's mosque. We can fully understand why so many filmmakers are drawn here. A thriving tourist industry has grown up around this most famous of Moroccan film locations and they have David Lean to thank for this after choosing Ait Benhaddou as a location for his 1962 classic, Laurence of Arabia.

Hours have quickly passed and we find ourselves back at the main gates, now busier than ever. It seems that on leaving for this trip we had unwittingly brought a bit of Agadir with us. We'd realised this when we noticed the tour buses tailing us all the way, but you can hardly expect a place like Ait Benhaddou to stay secret from the ten million tourists who travel to Morocco every year.

It was its fame that brought me here but inevitably it's this fame that has taken away part of its real spirit. For centuries this fortified city lived a paranoid existence at odds with the harsh landscape around it, with only its oasis for comfort. The flocks of tourists have reduced it to a theme park. However, with every rainstorm another layer is washed back to the earth and without its fame the desert would have eaten up far more of it over the last 30 years. It's the price Ait Benhaddou has paid for movie stardom and a longer life. The sun is now approaching the mountains on the horizon. We head back to our Corsa and onto the roads with tour buses in tow.

Learn more about this author, Will Hurrell.
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