He laughed heartily, but his son Diego Jr., 34, said his father was only half joking. “You know, there’s a saying that when someone wants to commit suicide in Tabernas, they hang themselves like in the westerns,” said Diego Garcia Sr., one of the originators of the show at Oasys almost two decades ago (he has since retired into a managerial role). Even death here is said to echo the movies. Rumors swirl about the parentage of one resident who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Henry Fonda, the villain in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In the white-washed village of 4,000 people, a silhouette cut-out of Clint Eastwood hangs on a building in the central plaza. The three western-theme amusement parks in the Tabernas desert- Oasys MiniHollywood, Fort Bravo, and Western Leone -are all a short drive from the town of the same name in the province of Almería. plays a sheriff in Oasys MiniHollywood’s Wild West show. Leone’s Dollars movies were an audacious ode to an America that he had first known through the Hollywood films of his Roman childhood.ĭiego Garcia Jr. With their ironic humor, moral ambivalence, and operatic scope, the films not only made Clint Eastwood a poncho-wearing, gun-slinging icon but also came to define the genre known as the spaghetti western.

For years it was, most famously as the solitary expanse at the heart of the Italian director Sergio Leone ’s classic Dollars trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966). The Tabernas could be mistaken for New Mexico, Texas or Arizona. Welcome to Oasys MiniHollywood -a movie set-turned-Wild West theme park in Southern Spain, on the fringe of Europe’s only desert. “Oye! Estamos jugando!” a sheriff yelled. As the gunfire continued, some of the kids laughed, others cried. Coyote howls and soul-shaking leitmotifs blared from loudspeakers while kids in cowboy costumes shook toy guns at each other. Another flailed from the hangman’s noose, and, before going limp, waved goodbye to the tourists who had clustered to watch the shootout from the porches and balconies of the bank, the sheriff’s office, the saloon, and the hotel surrounding the square. An outlaw swung off his saddle and clung sideways to his galloping horse. A sheriff heaved himself off a balcony onto a bale of hay on the ground. Three sheriffs stood against three outlaws: dark waistcoats versus khaki duster jackets.

Punches were thrown, shots fired, insults slung. The show began, as the movies it mimics often do, when a stranger rode into town.

The wild west movie