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| Photo via Disney Wiki |
Welcome to Agrabah, city of mystery and enchantment, where the caravan camels roam,
where they cut off your ears if they don't like your face where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home.
Clues to the real-life location of Agrabah, the setting for Disney's 1992 blockbuster
Aladdin, pepper and spice the said movie. The narrator sings upfront that the tale takes place in Arabia, but he also tells us, confoundingly, that Agrabah lies by the Jordan River, which traverses present-day Israel and Jordan.
But
Aladdin's layout supervisor Rasoul Azadani did not look to those places for inspiration. He styled Agrabah after his native Iran instead, particularly his hometown of Isfahan. Aladdin, Jasmine, Abu and Genie would fit squarely in here.
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| The Masjed-e Imam (Imam Mosque) in Isfahan, Iran. Photo via Fulvio Spada |
Even the pretend-Agrabah in Tokyo DisneySea seems to rip off Isfahan's landmarks.
Many eagle-eyed viewers, however, have likened the Sultan's Palace in Agrabah to the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. The linguistic sameness of Agra and Agrabah might be more by design than accident too.
But we've been grasping at straws all along. The story of Aladdin as it originally appears on Arabian Nights is set in China. The country's Xinjiang region is home to many Uyghur Muslims.
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