Children of Blood and Bone: South Africa's Real Film Locations

Tomi Adeyemi built Orïsha out of Yoruba cosmology and pre-colonial West African geography — the maji clans, the ten orisha they answer to, the cities named for real places like Ilorin and Sokoto. When Paramount went looking for somewhere to build it physically, the production landed almost 5,000 kilometers away, on the other side of the continent. Children of Blood and Bone was shot in Cape Town, in the misty foothills of the Drakensberg, and inside a derelict Durban sugar refinery — not in Nigeria, and not anywhere in West Africa.

That gap between where the story comes from and where it was built is, in itself, the most interesting thing about this production for a traveler. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood spent 74 days turning a 42-acre stretch of South African farmland into a fantasy kingdom using real materials and real weather, then sent second units into two of the country’s most scenic — and least filmed-together — regions. The movie opens worldwide on January 15, 2027. Here is where it was actually made, and how to see it for yourself before the release turns these places into a pilgrimage.

Cape Town Film Studios: 42 Acres Built Into the Kingdom of Orïsha

Cape Town Film Studios sits in Faure, about 30 kilometers from the city center, on 200 hectares that have hosted Mad Max: Fury Road, Tomb Raider, Maze Runner: The Death Cure and the series Black Sails and Good Omens since it opened in 2010. For Children of Blood and Bone, Prince-Bythewood opened pre-production with a specific instruction to her design team: no fake sunsets, no LED walls. The crew converted 42 acres of the lot into a permanent outdoor set for Orïsha — eucalyptus trunks trucked in from Zimbabwe for the framing, roofs thatched in Natal yellow grass sourced from KwaZulu-Natal, the whole structure then left exposed for ten weeks to the “Cape Doctor,” the region’s relentless southeasterly wind, so the wood and thatch would age the way a real settlement does rather than the way a freshly built set does.

The local production company behind the logistics, Moonlighting Films, has been Cape Town’s go-to service partner since 1997. One statistic from the shoot is worth sitting with: of the 465 grip and electrical crew positions on the film, 68% were filled by Black South African women — an unusually high ratio for a production of this budget, and a sign of how far the Cape’s film labor market has developed since Invictus shot here in 2009. It’s the kind of detail that puts a human floor under a fantasy epic: a gaffer on this crew started as a security guard on that earlier production; a construction coordinator learned framing by building RDP housing near Khayelitsha.

The Atlantic Seaboard: Cape Town’s Real Coastline on Screen

Sources describing the shoot use one recurring phrase for the second Cape Town location: “the salt-sprayed Atlantic rim.” No article names a specific beach or suburb, and there’s a reason to be careful about inventing one — the production has kept its exact coastal footprint quiet. What’s certain is the geography: the drive from Sea Point through Camps Bay, Llandudno and Hout Bay tracks a coastline of granite headlands, white sand and a cold, restless ocean that needs no set dressing to look otherworldly. It’s also, from certain angles, a coastline with Robben Island visible offshore — a reminder that this stretch of water carries its own history well before any camera arrives.

For a traveler, the Atlantic seaboard rewards slow movement more than a checklist. Cape Point, at the peninsula’s southern tip, gives you the full arc of the same coastline in a single day, penguins included. Lion’s Head, the smaller peak beside Table Mountain, puts you above it at sunrise or sunset — the exact vantage that appears, one way or another, in nearly every production that has ever filmed in this city.

Bo-Kaap: Cultural Ground Truth Beside the Set

No source connects Bo-Kaap directly to the shoot, but it earns a place in this itinerary on its own terms — and it sits at the foot of Signal Hill, the same ridge that anchors Lion’s Head and much of the skyline the film uses. The neighborhood was settled by Cape Malay families, many descended from people enslaved and brought to the Cape by Dutch colonists, and its cobbled streets of ochre, teal and magenta houses were painted in the years after abolition as a visible assertion of identity. It holds South Africa’s oldest mosque. Walking it with a local guide — rather than photographing it from a tour bus window, which is how most visitors experience it — is the difference between a backdrop and a place with its own unresolved history, which is not a bad frame of mind to carry into a film about a fantasy kingdom built on real cultural inheritance.

Tasting the Cape: Food Beyond the Frame

Orïsha’s world runs on food as much as magic — communal meals, market stalls, the texture of daily life around the maji and kosidán. Cape Town’s own food culture, shaped by Malay, Dutch, British and Xhosa influences over three centuries, gives a traveler a way into that same idea without needing a film crew’s permission to access it. A walking food tour through the Bree Street district covers small producers and family-run stalls; a hands-on cooking class goes further, putting you in front of a stove rather than a plate, working through dishes with roots that reach back toward the same West African culinary lineage that shaped the novel’s setting.

Stellenbosch, Sharks and the Sky: Cape Town’s Wild Edges

Away from the coast and the studio lot, the Cape Winelands sit less than an hour inland — Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and Paarl occupying the same agricultural interior that has quietly funded the region’s growth for three centuries, a useful contrast to the salt-air drama of the Atlantic side. Forty-five minutes the other direction, False Bay offers cage diving with great white and other shark species, guided and equipped, for travelers who want the Cape’s reputation as a wild, unscripted place to feel earned rather than performed. And for the view that ties all of it together — the two oceans, Table Mountain’s flat summit, the peninsula’s full length — a short helicopter flight from the V&A Waterfront delivers, in 25 minutes, the perspective no ground-level tour can match.

The Drakensberg Foothills: Where Orïsha’s Exteriors Turn Wild

The second confirmed pillar of the shoot moves inland and up, into what sources describe simply as “the misty Drakensberg foothills” of KwaZulu-Natal. No specific pass or peak has been named — this is South Africa’s longest and highest mountain range, a UNESCO World Heritage Site stretching along the Lesotho border, and the production has not pinned down exactly which stretch of it appears on screen. What’s not in doubt is the terrain’s character: basalt escarpments over a thousand meters tall, tussock grassland, cloud that sits low enough to swallow a ridgeline mid-afternoon. Parks like Royal Natal National Park anchor the range’s public access on the tourism side — not confirmed as this film’s exact set, but representative of the scale and drama the crew was working with.

There’s no dedicated Drakensberg tour product bookable on its own in this range yet, so the most direct way in is the route the film’s own logistics likely resembled: out of Durban, inland via the N3 and R617 to Underberg, then up by 4x4 onto the switchbacks of the Sani Pass itself, which climbs into the foothills before crossing the border into Lesotho at the top. It’s the same road, broadly, that any production based in KwaZulu-Natal would have used to reach this terrain, and it remains the single best way for a traveler to stand inside it.

Durban: The City Behind the Tyrant’s Throne Room

The third piece of the puzzle is the strangest, and the most site-specific: a derelict sugar refinery outside Durban, gutted and rebuilt as the throne room of King Saran, the film’s tyrant antagonist. Durban has been a sugar town since the mid-19th century, its industry built on indentured labor brought from India under colonial contract and later hardened by apartheid-era segregation — a history that makes an abandoned refinery a loaded, resonant choice for a story about power and its costs. To be precise about what isn’t confirmed here: it is not the still-operating Tongaat Hulett refinery, which processes roughly 600,000 tonnes of sugar a year and was not the film’s site. The actual refinery used has not been named publicly, and this guide won’t guess at it. What can be said is that it sits somewhere in greater Durban, and that the city itself — the Golden Mile beachfront, the Indian Ocean warmth, the working port — is entirely open to visit regardless of which building the production chose.

Not Lagos: Why a Yoruba-Inspired Story Was Filmed 5,000 Kilometers Away

The production’s own paperwork once pointed toward Lagos. A January 2025 trade report described principal photography beginning there that February, and Wikipedia’s entry on the film still carries that claim in its filming section. Every other source that tracked the shoot as it happened — the Nollywood Reporter’s direct account, Cape Town Etc, The Location Guide, West Africa Weekly — describes a production that never set foot in Nigeria, running instead across Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal and Spain’s Canary Islands for its full 74 days. The Lagos plan appears to have been an early-stage option that was quietly dropped before cameras rolled, and this guide follows the weight of evidence: South Africa and Spain, not West Africa.

The reasons are financial and infrastructural, and they’re documented rather than speculative. South Africa’s Foreign Film and TV Production Incentive refunds 25% of qualifying local production spend, rising to 35% for co-productions, with a further 5% available if at least a fifth of department heads are Black South African citizens. Nigeria has no comparable scheme for foreign productions. Cape Town Film Studios has been operating at Hollywood scale since 2010; Lagos’s own planned studio complex, a $100 million “Film City,” was still not operational when this shoot happened. Nigerian filmmaker Benneth Nwankwo put the resulting frustration in blunt terms: a story built entirely on Yoruba culture sent its location fees, its crew wages and months of local economic activity to South Africa and Spain instead of the country whose mythology it borrowed, when historic sites like Ile-Ife, Osogbo and Abeokuta could plausibly have stood in for parts of Orïsha.

Two further threads sit alongside that debate, worth naming without adjudicating. The casting of Amandla Stenberg, an actress of mixed heritage, as Princess Amari — a character the novel describes with markedly dark skin, in a story where colorism is a structural theme — drew criticism when it was announced in January 2025. And in July 2026, Tomi Adeyemi publicly distanced herself from the finished film, sharing a message she’d sent Stenberg in February 2025 asking not to be named in interviews connected to the project, saying she has not seen the film and will not watch it, and later describing a “traumatizing” on-set incident that neither Paramount nor the production have detailed. She did not attend CinemaCon in April 2026. None of this changes where the film was shot. It does mean the geography question — why South Africa, not Nigeria — arrived at the center of the film’s public conversation well before its release, rather than after.

Planning the Trip: Cape Town, the Drakensberg and Durban in One Itinerary

• Confirm your visa or entry requirements for South Africa with your own embassy before booking flights — requirements vary by nationality and weren't fully verified for every market in our research.
• Book any Cape Town–Durban flight early; only a handful of daily direct routes connect the two cities.
• Pack for two climates in one trip: the Atlantic wind at the coast and the cooler, changeable air of the Drakensberg foothills.
• Carry your passport on the Sani Pass day trip, even though it starts and ends the same day in South Africa.
• Stick to well-reviewed operators and known routes after dark, particularly in city centers — standard advice for South Africa's tourist zones, which remain well-equipped and heavily visited.

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