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La Calahorra
For the town of Flagstone in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), production designer Carlo Simi constructed a western street set at the La Calahorra train station near Guadix. Little remains today but the brick structures of the Phoenix Bank and the Hotel, which have been partially absorbed into an adjacent chicken farm. Once Upon a Time in Almería: The Legacy of Hollywood in Spain’ (Daylight Books 2017)
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Cortijo del Fraile
Federico Garcia Lorca based his play Blood Wedding on actual events that occurred in 1928. The ill-fated wedding was to take place at the Cortijo where the bride lived with her father. Hours before the wedding, she attempted to elope with her cousin instead, but he was shot and killed by the groom’s brother before they could get away. In his stage directions, Lorca suggests the bride’s home appears in a “panorama of brownish plains, everything hardened like a landscape of ceramic.” The interior of the cortijo served as Indio’s hideout in For a Few Dollars More (1965), and the […]
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Mini-Hollywood
Following the success of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Sergio Leone commissioned Carlo Simi to construct an entire western town for the second title in the trilogy, For a Few Dollars More. Two rival bounty hunters, (Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef), both in pursuit of the fugitive El Indio, eye each other suspiciously from their hotel windows on opposite sides of the street. The building now labelled the “Yellow Rose” housed Van Cleef’s hotel and the town saloon. Once Upon a Time in Almería: The Legacy of Hollywood in Spain’ (Daylight Books 2017)
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