Once upon a time in Almería, Western film sets were the star attraction for those visiting the southeastern province of Spain. But a growing appreciation for the surrounding scenery — home to Europe’s only desert — now sees the landscape sharing equal billing with the old spaghetti westerns.
Once upon a time in Almería, Western film sets were the star attraction for those visiting the southeastern province of Spain. But a growing appreciation for the surrounding scenery — home to Europe’s only desert — now sees the landscape sharing equal billing with the old spaghetti westerns. It’s sundown and the horse up ahead is kicking up dust as we ride out across the badlands wilderness. Through the haze, I can just about make out a mighty sandstone canyon looming large on the horizon.
At high noon the following morning, I head towards the rootin’ tootin’ Wild West movie sets that González had told me of. It was back in the 1960s that Almería stepped into the spotlight after the Italian film director Sergio Leone used the landscape to shoot his notorious spaghetti western films, a subgenre of westerns so called as they were often produced and directed by Italians.
As the smoke slowly starts to clear, I make my way towards the dusty car park, taking a moment to appreciate the faded beauty of this retro frontier town originally built in the early 1970s. The cowboy show’s leading man, who has an impressive 26-year run of performing at Fort Bravo under his belt, now stands out on the rickety boardwalk, puffing on a cigarette while checking his phone as a threadbare star-spangled banner flaps noisily in the wind.
“I was born just 20 minutes from here and one of my earliest memories was meeting Henry Ford when I was this high,” he says, mimicking that he was roughly the same height as the top of the Hollywood actor’s cowboy boots at the time. “In my early career, I was a stunt man in movies being filmed in Almería. Then, about 40 years ago, I started working at this park.
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