The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille — Dunes Center

The story

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille decided that building a miniature set for his silent epic "The Ten Commandments" was for amateurs. Instead, he hired French designer Paul Iribe to erect a full-scale Egyptian city on the shifting sand of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes—complete with 110-foot plaster gates, giant pharaoh statues, and twenty-one plaster sphinxes lining a grand avenue. When filming wrapped, hauling hundreds of tons of plaster, horsehair, and timber back to Los Angeles was absurdly expensive. Legend claims DeMille blew the set to pieces with dynamite so rival filmmakers couldn't reuse his masterpiece, but the reality was simpler and cheaper: crew members bulldozed the plaster city into trenches in the dunes and let the coastal winds bury the rest.

For over sixty years, "Pharaoh's City" lived on as a Hollywood urban legend—a colossal fake city rotting beneath the dunes off Highway 1. Film buffs rediscovered the location in the 1980s, but excavating plaster of Paris after decades under damp coastal sand was an archaeological nightmare. When excavation teams finally mounted digs in the 2010s, they recovered surprisingly intact plaster sphinx heads and body sections (including major finds in 2012 and 2014). Sand and wind had buried the fragile shells, turning trash from silent film history into genuine California antiquity.

You won't find the set sitting open on the beach—most of it remains safely entombed under the dunes to protect what's left. Instead, the surviving fragments live at the Dunes Center, a small nonprofit housed in a restored Craftsman building in downtown Guadalupe. There, behind glass cases, you can stare down the hollow, painted face of a century-old plaster sphinx and appreciate Hollywood's grandest secret landfill.