Was the TV show Koh-Lanta actually filmed on Koh Lanta
The French TV show Koh-Lanta was filmed once in 2001 on Ko Rok, a pair of uninhabited islands 27 kilometres south of Koh Lanta and located within its national park, though the series has been shot elsewhere for most of its 20+ year run.
Photo: Illustration: Lanta News
Type "Koh Lanta" into a search box in France and you will mostly get a television programme. It has run on TF1 since 2001, it is one of the longest-running shows on French television, and it has sent a generation of viewers looking for an island they have half-heard of.
So the question arrives here in two directions. Visitors ask whether this is the island from the show. Viewers ask whether the island is real. Both answers are more interesting than a yes or a no.
Was it filmed here
Once, in 2001, and not on this island.
The first season was shot on Ko Rok, a pair of small uninhabited islands about 27 kilometres south of Koh Lanta's southern tip. The contestants were there for 43 days, and the series went out on TF1 between 4 August and 22 September 2001.
That is the part most write-ups get half right. They either say the show was filmed on Koh Lanta, which it was not, or that it has nothing to do with the place, which is also wrong.
The bit that makes the name honest
Ko Rok is not simply "near" Koh Lanta. It is inside Mu Ko Lanta National Park, the park established on 15 August 1990 that covers 134 square kilometres and takes in Ko Rok Nai, the Ko Rok group, Ko Talabeng, Ko Ngai, Ko Hin Daeng and parts of Ko Lanta Yai itself.
So the show was filmed in Koh Lanta's national park, on islands administered from here, and named itself after the district it was sitting in. The name was never arbitrary. It just was not the beach with the resorts on it.
Where it goes now
Not here, and not for a long time.
After that first season the production moved on and kept moving. It has been to Palawan in the Philippines (2007), to Caramoan in the Philippines (2008), to Koh Rong in Cambodia (2017), and the recent run of seasons has settled on Caramoan again, filming there through 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
The programme is still called Koh-Lanta. It has been filmed somewhere else for most of its life.
You can go to Ko Rok
This is the part worth knowing if you came here because of the show. Ko Rok is a normal day trip from Koh Lanta in season: clear water, reef, and no development, because national park rules do not allow any. It is on our map of the island's natural places.
Hin Daeng and Hin Muang, the deep pinnacles divers come for, lie out in the same direction.
What the island's own name means
Less settled than the internet suggests.
One reading takes it from Thai, lan taa, giving something like "island of a million eyes", which is the version travel sites repeat and which suits a television show rather too neatly. Another traces it to the Javanese lantas, a type of grill used for drying fish, which fits an island whose east coast was a fishing and trading port long before anyone filmed anything here.
Reference sources describe the origin as unclear. We are not going to settle it in a news article, and anyone who tells you firmly which one is right is guessing.
And the island itself
Roughly 30 kilometres long, a district of Krabi province, a permanent population in the tens of thousands, a Muslim majority away from the beaches, an old trading town on the east coast, and a national park at the southern end. People live and work here year round. It is not a set.
If you arrived at this page from the television programme, the closest thing to what you watched is a boat south to Ko Rok on a clear day.
