How the Almeria badlands became the Wild West

When Sergio Leone arrived in Almeria province in 1964 to film A Fistful of Dollars — a low-budget Italian reimagining of the Japanese samurai film Yojimbo (1961) as a Western, starring an American actor named Clint Eastwood who had been appearing in the television series Rawhide — he was not the first filmmaker to use the Almeria landscape. Samuel Bronston’s epic productions (King of Kings, 1961; El Cid, 1961; The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964) had already established Almeria as a cost-effective alternative to Hollywood location filming in Spain; the Franco-era Spanish government offered generous film subsidies, cheap labour, and the cooperation of the Spanish army as extras. But Leone’s use of the Tabernas Desert specifically — its dry riverbeds, eroded clay hills, and golden light quality — as a substitute for the American Southwest was more fundamental: not a backdrop, but a visual argument. The Almerian badlands, Leone believed, were in many ways more authentically “Western” than the actual American West had been by the early 1960s.

The three films of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” — A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) — transformed the Western genre internationally and created Clint Eastwood’s film career. The climactic three-way pistol duel (the “triello”) in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, filmed partly in the Tabernas area and partly at the Plaza de Toros de Almeria, became one of the most imitated scenes in film history. Leone returned to Almeria for Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), his elegy for the Western genre, with Henry Fonda cast against type as a brutal villain. The western town set constructed for Leone’s productions — the “Poblado del Oeste,” known commercially as “Mini Hollywood” — accommodated subsequent productions including A Man Called Horse (1970), and dozens of European Westerns throughout the 1970s. After the Spaghetti Western era ended in approximately 1980, the desert continued to attract productions: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, the desert chase sequence) and many others filmed in the unique landscape.

The town of Tabernas and the Almeria province have embraced their film heritage. The three original western sets have been converted into commercial attractions: Oasys/Mini Hollywood (the largest, with a zoo and water park addition), Fort Bravo/Texas Hollywood (specialising in film-era atmosphere), and Western Leone (the most historically authentic, located closest to the original Leone filming locations). The Almeria Film Office continues to attract productions; the desert has appeared in Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, and numerous commercials and music videos.