Once Upon a Time in Almería

Photos by Salvi Danés
Translated by Paul Geddis

Like almost all the residents of the village of Los Albaricoques, José Ruíz played a Mexican in Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More.

Many years ago, Diego Rodríguez worked as a star stuntman for Almería Film Studios, aka Fort Bravo, aka Texas-Hollywood. The surrounding dusty Andalucian province routinely served as a stand-in for Texas, Mexico, and countless unnamed towns populated by gunslingers. More than 600 spaghetti westerns were filmed here, in the process transforming this region of southern Spain into a caricature of the Wild West as imagined by Italian directors.

“In 1984, I was in Rustlers’ Rhapsody with Fernando Rey,” Diego reminisced about his glory days. “And in ’81 I did Conan the Barbarian with Schwarzenegger. You know when he punches the camel? You know why it fell over? They’d shot it full of tranquilizers. Cinema’s all an illusion, man. I’m 52 and I can’t even get it up. Do you think I could ride a horse? Bah! I used to be a stuntman. I did Queen of Swords with David Carradine in 2000. I made 30,000 euros for that. You don’t see me, but I was in it.”

Today, Diego is still employed by Fort Bravo, but instead of pretending to shoot people and pulling off death-defying stunts on horseback, he pushes a mop. As the resident janitor, he’s the caretaker of Fort Bravo’s pair of remaining sets: “Texas” and “Mexico.” Although they’re in disrepair, the sets are still occasionally used for their intended purpose. The 2004 French film Blueberry was shot here, as well as an upcoming episode of Dr. Who. Mostly, however, Fort Bravo serves as a midlevel tourist attraction. And while the formerly rough-and-tumble frontier atmosphere has been compromised by the construction of rental chalets, a swimming pool, and a convention center, every Saturday a coachload of pensioners is wheeled in to watch a “Wild West Show” that alternates between a bank robbery and a saloon brawl. The local lawman is French Guianese-born Ibrahim, Fort Bravo’s security guard, who has appropriately set up shop in the jailhouse. From the nearby saloon—which, naturally, serves as Fort Bravo’s command center—a compilation of Ennio Morricone’s greatest hits is piped out to speakers all over town.

Every Saturday, actors stage a bank robbery on Fort Bravo’s picturesque Main Street.

When it’s not tourist season, the ticket price includes a soft drink and a wagon ride, chauffeured by Rafael Aparicio García, a Gypsy who caught the film bug and who, like everyone in these parts, loves to brag.

“I’ve been here since ’92. I do a bit of everything: maintenance, films, music videos, and ads,” he said. “When there’s the budget for it we do stunts—things like falling off horses, jumping out of windows… Hey, I was in Dollar for the Dead with Emilio Estevez!”

Fort Bravo isn’t the only town seemingly transplanted from North America to Spain. Just a few miles down the road is Fraile, a replica of El Paso, Texas. Like Fort Bravo, a lack of business has forced Fraile to transform into a theme park known as Mini Hollywood, but Diego Garcia, who choreographs the town’s Wild West shows, remembers a time when the entire region was a booming show-business outpost.

“When I was a kid, the whole of Almería worked in the film industry,” he said. “I started with horses, which led to doing stunts. Once I played a good guy, a bad guy, a hustler, a Mexican, and a soldier all in the same movie. I don’t know how many films I’ve done; it’s like asking someone how many women they’ve slept with. You always forget one.”

Almería’s popularity as a location for westerns is largely because of the nearby Tabernas Desert, which covers almost 108 square miles and resembles the American West in both climate and landscape. The first producer to realize the area’s potential was Michael Carreras, who filmed Tierra Brutal here in the early 60s, although some contend that Joaquin Romero Marchent got here first with El Sabor de la Venganza. In any case, the real boom arrived with Sergio Leone, known locally as “the nutcracker” for his habit of endlessly clasping and unclasping his hands when he worked. He reasoned that if Hollywood could make films about Romans, why couldn’t an Italian make movies about gunslingers? Although some scenes for 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars were shot in the region, Leone didn’t take full advantage of Almería’s surroundings until the following year, when production began on the second film in the Dollars trilogy, For a Few Dollars More. The films still stand as some of Clint Eastwood’s finest work.

Leone’s assistant director Tonino Valerii first came to Almería on his honeymoon, and he spent much of his romantic vacation scouting locations around the gold mine at Rodalquilar, the primary source of income for Los Albaricoques, a hamlet in the province of Níjar. When Tonino visited Los Albaricoques, he saw a village filled with pretty, white-walled houses that could easily double for 1870s Mexico. José Ruíz, 81, said that the entire village worked on the film, which serves as a violence-filled family photo album for a generation of locals.

“The mine closed in ’66 and a lot of people moved away,” José said. “But those of us who stayed behind worked in the films. Working in the mine was hard and dangerous work. People got ill, a lot of them with lung disease. In one year, my grandmother buried my father, my uncle Pepe, my uncle Antonio, and her son-in-law. In 1936 and 1937, all the women here were widows. We never saw them dressed in white again.”

José Novo, aka Pepe Fonda, makes his living as an actor and stuntman in Fort Bravo and claims to be Henry Fonda’s bastard son.

The nascent Almería film industry got a boost from Francisco Franco’s dictatorial government in 1964, when legislation was put in place that encouraged film production in the region. King of Kings, Lawrence of Arabia, Cleopatra, Travels with My Aunt, The Wind and the Lion, and Never Say Never Again were all filmed here before Almería fell out of favor with Hollywood. Part of the attraction was that film crews could do virtually whatever they wanted in Spain. Leone went so far as to dynamite mountains to install a working railroad track in the middle of the desert; for Franklin J. Shaffner’s classic 1970 film Patton, the Spanish army leased 20th Century Fox the services of an entire company of soldiers. The oldest workers at the Grand Hotel still remember stuntmen throwing themselves off first-floor balconies and breaking their noses on the swimming pool’s mosaic tiles.

Today, Fort Bravo’s stuntmen still wear Stetsons on their heads and six-shooters strapped to their thighs. Pepe, who lives in Tabernas, started as an extra at Fort Bravo 25 years ago and makes his living these days as an actor and stuntman in the shows for tourists. He arrives at our meeting with a green folder overflowing with pixelated screenshots of Once Upon a Time in the West and the clippings from a story he peddled to the press a few years ago.

“I was 13 or 14 at the time,” he said, “and my mom told me that we were going to go to the cinema, and that’s where I’d meet my father. I was looking around, staring at everyone—the guy selling chestnuts, the usher, a guy with a motorbike—and my mom didn’t say anything. The film was Once Upon a Time in the West, and in the scene where Henry Fonda’s gang take the ranch and shoot the child, she turned to me and said, ‘That’s him. That’s your dad.’”

For years, tourists who visited Almería commented on the similarities between the Spanish teenager and the Hollywood star, and it wasn’t long before Pepe decided to tailor his own personality to that of the character Fonda plays in the film. The scraggly beard, tortured gaze, and tic at the corner of his mouth are all there. The only thing that doesn’t add up is that Pepe would have been six or seven at the time Once Upon a Time was shot. “Well, yeah, my mom told me that Henry Fonda had come here previously. Maybe he was on holiday,” contends Pepe. Can you blame a resident of a faux western town for being prone to mythmaking?

Diego García, the choreographer of the Wild West shows in Fraile, a town built to be a replica of El Paso where gun battles are reproduced for tourists. 

Fort Bravo feels like a ghost town, but it’s still a working film set, especially for movies and shows that require a ghost town. 

These days, myths might be preferable to facts. The Andalucía region is no longer a popular destination for filmmakers, and money is tight. When I visited Western Leone, yet another run-down fake village previously used as a movie set, I was asked for bribes by nearly everyone I asked to speak with.

Pepe blamed the transients who will work on set for next to nothing: “The owners of the film sets take advantage of junkies and the fact that there’s no other work. They end up working for peanuts. Once I turned up to a casting and this Gypsy turned to me and said straight out, ‘Pepe, go home. This is mine.’ The Gypsies are the worst. Put one in a film and a hundred will show up. I’ve seen Gypsy women filling baskets with sandwiches from the catering table. And then when it’s finally time to shoot you can’t find them for love or money.”

Although it’s true that Luis Beltrán, the chief stuntman on A Few Dollars More, claimed to have been twice stabbed in the stomach on the set by Gypsies, Raphael García said locals exaggerate the transients’ impact on the industry. “If there isn’t any work in cinema, it’s because the productions have moved to Ouarzazate, Morocco, where extras will work for as low as six euros a day.”

Nostalgia for the old days takes some strange turns. Manuel Hernández, the schoolteacher, spends his spare time walking around Los Albaricoques, creating fake bullet holes in locations featured in For a Few Dollars More’s most famous gunfights. He’s also the owner of the Hostal Rural Alba. Aside from its own brand of wine, featuring Eastwood on the label, the inn also has a fresco mural depicting—in a style somewhat reminiscent of Art Brut—the famous “pocket watch scene,” the final stand-off between Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Gian Maria Volonté.

Manuel is determined to revive the village’s fortunes and has even succeeded in renaming some of the local streets after the area’s cinematic history: Aguas Calientes (the town in the film), Ennio Morricone, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Sergio Leone are all commonly referenced when giving directions these days. When he first proposed the idea, the neighbors were reluctant to turn their town into an homage to Leone, but residents started to come around when Manuel began hosting regular screenings of a documentary about the films produced in the area.

Slowly, the townsfolk have begun to embrace the films as part of their lineage and identities. And perhaps one day, Hollywood will remember the potential of the western, and famous actors dressed as cowboys will run wild on horseback through the dusty streets of Almería once again.