This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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. Not just any old monolith; this happens to be the soaring mountain made famous when it offered a poncho-wearing Clint Eastwood sanctuary from a band of cut-throat outlaws. This slice of film history is an epic sight to behold, but my horse is in no mood to pause for a photo. Instead, with a snort, she continues to delicately pick her way through the bone-dry riverbeds and sage-studded dirt tracks, as I keep a hawk-like eye out for the slithering snakes that also call this thirsty land home. Everything about this twilight scenery feels as if I’m riding through the big-sky vistas of North America, so it’s a jolt back to reality when our trekking guide Sara González swings around in her saddle and greets the group with a cheerful “Hola!” instead of “Hey y’all!”.
I’ve travelled to Almería, a province of Andalucía tucked into the southeast corner of Spain’s Mediterranean coast, less than a three-hour flight away from the UK. This lesser-known region has somehow escaped the ravages of mass tourism, which seems curious given that Almería holds a seriously impressive calling card — it’s home to Tabernas, Europe’s only desert. Recently though, word has started to spread about the region’s natural wonders, attracting a new wave of visitors, says González, who’s a nurse by day and a cowgirl guide for the outdoor adventure company Malcaminos as evening falls.
“We’re seeing a much younger crowd of people in their twenties, thirties and forties now visiting Almería. They come from right across Europe for this landscape,” González calls back over her shoulder as we trek through the rocky, sun-scorched terrain. “Tourists used to come for the western movie sets, but these days, I have to explain the concept of spaghetti western movies to most of our customers,” she laughs as we hit the trail back to the ranch.
Oasys MiniHollywood is one of three former spaghetti western film sets in Tabernas.
Photograph by The Studio Under The Wall, Alamy
A fistful of euros
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. Leone ended up creating the Dollars Trilogy (also known as the Man with No Name Trilogy) — three masterpieces consisting of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly — in this semi-arid desert.
The region soon became known as the Hollywood of Europe, due to its heady offering of low production costs, an average of 3,000 hours of sunshine per year and the versatility of its shape-shifting landscape. It’s been used as a stand-in for locations as diverse as the American West for cowboy flicks, Turkey in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Uluru in Australia for an episode of The Crown in more recent years.
These days, aside from the odd production crew setting up camp, the cameras have mostly stopped rolling in Almería. Still, three Old West relics remain — Fort Bravo, Oasys MiniHollywood and Western Leone — clustered around the old town of Tabernas, about a 30-minute drive from Almería Airport. They’ve survived, I discover as I arrive at Fort Bravo for their midday Western extravaganza, by rebranding as quirky tourist attractions offering visitors high-kicking can-can dance shows and chuckwagon rides through the eerily deserted backdrops.
(The Wild West lives on in Southern Spain.)
I pull up a seat in the spit-and-sawdust saloon just in time to see a rugged cowboy swagger in, a 10-gallon hat tipped over brooding eyes and silver spurs jangling at his ankles as he thuds lazily across the wooden floorboards. Propping up the handsome mahogany bar, two women wearing a rustle of old-timey satin dresses exchange anxious glances as he saunters past, his right-hand twitching over a shiny pistol nestled in his holster belt.
The audience members around me already know the time-honoured script that this cowpoke reads from. We’ve all watched enough westerns to understand that coming hot on this desperado’s heels will be a ragbag posse of bandits, swiftly followed by a showdown and, ultimately, a deadly shoot-out. But that doesn’t dampen the thrill of watching Fort Bravo’s bombastic show, which plays out in a fury of exuberant stunt moves, the air thick with the intoxicating smell of gunpowder as cap guns pop with startling bangs.
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.
Once a filming location for spaghetti westerns, OasysMini Hollywood is an Americana-flavoured theme park, complete with a gold rush-era town and a cast of cowboys and outlaws today.
Photograph by Zoey Goto
While Fort Bravo feels a little like the ghost of westerns past, at my next stop just along the winding road, I catch a glimpse of the future for Almería’s stage sets. More than 100 movies were filmed on location at Oasys MiniHollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, before it returned for a second act as an Americana-flavoured theme park, complete with a goldrush-era town crammed with gift shops, a zoo, splash park and upscale barbecue restaurant overlooking the craggy mountains — it attracts a healthy 180,000 visitors annually. Work is currently underway to add a boarding house-style hotel to the park.
The costume shop on Main Street appears to be doing a roaring trade of hiring out pioneer outfits to visitors, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between tourists and cast members. In among the sea of cowboy hats, I somehow locate Diego García Ceba, entertainment manager at Oasys MiniHollywood. Tucking his thumbs into the pockets of his leather waistcoat, he rocks back on his heels as he fondly recalls that westerns have always taken centre stage in his life.
“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. Now I’m in charge of all the action here — the western re-enactments and can-can dance shows — but what keeps me here is my love for the horses,” he says. Right on cue, the sound of thundering hooves signals the opening scene of my second western show of the day, this time involving Oscar-worthy performances from wranglers falling from first-floor balconies into strategically placed hay bales, as Rawhide plays over the open-air speakers.
Tabernas Desert — the only in Europe — has served as the backdrop to many notable films throughout the decades.
Photograph by Zoey Goto
Queen of the Desert
Before leaving Almería, there’s just time to meet naturist and tourist guide Cristina Serena Seguí for a 4X4 drive through the Tabernas Desert. With a pink scarf tied at her neck like an explorer, Cristina explains that she started her outdoor adventure company Malcaminos two decades previously, leading tours on a couple of shaggy camels, much like a scene from the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, which was also shot in Tabernas.
Somewhat sadly, the camels have since been upgraded to jeeps and horses, Cristina explains as we bump along in her car across a desert scape barely touched by water, thanks to the flanking mountain ranges that act as a natural barrier, stopping the moisture-laden air from the Mediterranean Sea sweeping in.
“In the 20 years I’ve worked here, attitudes towards this desert have changed. It was once considered a wasteland holding very little interest,” she says, pulling over the jeep to soak up blockbuster views of the lunar-like slopes and ravines, which millions of years ago were hidden deep under the sea. Today, scientists from across the globe regularly visit to gain insights into how we can grow produce and live with less water, as Tabernas becomes an increasingly extreme case study. In a good year, the region receives just 20 centimetres of rain per year, but a drought last year saw so little rainfall that agriculture, a crucial source of income for the region, took a blow.
“We’re now having to think about what Tabernas offers that’s of high value. There’s tourism, of course, which increasingly involves agritourism. But we also have plenty of sun and wind, so renewable energy is becoming a focus.” Local farmers are adjusting to the changing climate by growing fruit and vegetables under plastic. Almería now has one of the highest concentrations of greenhouses in the world, Cristina adds. “People are shocked when they first see the greenhouses, but in many ways, it’s an intelligent solution to the lack of rain as you avoid evaporation. We arrived at these conclusions long before others simply because we had to for our survival.”
As I head back towards the airport, passing an ocean of solar panels lining the parched roadside and the off-beat western-film-sets-turned-tourist-attractions, Cristina’s parting words ring out: “Almería has always been a land that teaches people how to adapt to the times.”
How to do it: EasyJet flies directly from London to Almería. Malcaminos offer 4X4 jeep tours of Tabernas Desert from €35 (£35) per person and horse-riding treks from €40 (£34) per person, with a minimum of two people per tour. Entrance to Fort Bravo is €20 (£17) for adults, €16 (£14) for children. Entrance to Oasys MiniHollywood is €26 (£22) for adults, €17 (£14.50) for children.
This story was created with the support of Visit Spain, Visit Andalucía and EasyJet.
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