Once upon a time in Almería

As chronicled here last time, we spent what is known here as the Halloween break (from school) on the Costa del Sol in Spain. This was meant to be a pure break, i.e. not like our usual holidays where we spend most of the time on the road. A strangely high percentage of what has historically passed for our vacation time has actually been accounted for by visits to relatives in California, Nevada and Ireland. And, when in recent years we have gone on real holidays, we have tended to cover lots of ground in a short amount of time, rather than savoring any one particular spot. We spent hardly any time at all in the nice mountain villa (with pool) that we rented in Tuscany last spring, spending our week instead driving all over Chianti, Florence, Pisa and other corners of the province. Our holiday in Spain was going to be different. We weren’t going to rent a car. We would only wander as far away from the hotel as we could attain on foot or on local transit, devoting most of our time to the pool and the beach. Relaxing, unwinding, resting. Those were our aims.

Yeah, well, that lasted a couple of days. The truth is, even though we aren’t exactly the most athletic, or even active, family around, we are not that good at just sitting around and relaxing either. We need to be doing something all the time, even if that something is sitting in a car or on a train. The Munchkin was content to spend full days in the pool, but the Missus and I were itching to see something besides central Marbella. We thought about going to Gibraltar, which was close enough to see when the air was clear. We even thought about a day tour to Tangier. (The northern tip of Morocco was also close enough to see across the Mediterranean most days, as the sun set in the evening.) But in the back of my head, there was one name that was always tugging at my mind: Almería.

The province of Almería occupies the southeast corner of Spain. Its eponymous city is a port that is believed to have been founded by the Phoenicians and subsequently controlled by Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Muslims and, off and on for the past few centuries, the Catholic monarchs. Its landmarks include Spain’s major Muslim fortress, built in the 7th century. To the city’s north is an arid, mountainous zone that is said to be the only true desert in Europe. Its harsh landscape drew at least one or two European filmmakers there in the 1950s, but a real trend was started in 1961 when English director Michael Carreras (who would go on to produce various Hammer horror films and write the screenplay for She and One Million Years B.C.) came there to film a Spanish/U.S. production. It was a western called The Savage Guns (Tierra brutal, in Spanish) and starred Richard Basehart and Don Taylor, as a veteran of the War of Independence, living a quiet life on his farm in Sonora near the Arizona border, who has his vow to foreswear violence tested by a gang of thugs. From that point on, the inland desert landscapes of Almería would be locations for filmmakers looking to create everything from the American southwest, Mexcio, various North African and Middle Eastern countries, ancient mythical lands and even other planets.

It is estimated that more than 300 westerns have been partially or totally filmed in Almería. The most notable of these were the so-called spaghetti westerns of Italian director Sergio Leone, which consist of his Clint Eastwood trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly plus his masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West. (For this last film, Leone went to the effort and expense of also shooting a few scenes in the American Southwest’s Monument Valley, as a tribute to the “authentic” westerns that had inspired him.) Other westerns filmed there include Django, which starred Franco Nero as ruthless gunfighter dragging around a coffin with a machine gun in it; Sabata, with Lee Van Cleef; The Legend of Frenchie King, with Brigitte Bardot; Red Sun, about a samurai in the old west, with Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune; A Town Called Hell, with Robert Shaw; and Valdez Is Coming, with Burt Lancaster.

If the term “spaghetti western” started out as a sarcastic joke, it was because a lot of the Spanish-filmed flicks simply weren’t very good. In fact, often the best thing about a spaghetti or paella western was its name. Among of the more interesting titles (in the English language versions, anyway) are these: