by Vincent West
CARAZO, Spain, Sept. 13 — There are two kinds of people in the world, Clint Eastwood’s film Man With No Name tells a rival gunman who has no bullets. One has a loaded gun and the other has an excavator. “You dig.”
Volunteers in northern Spain have taken his words to heart, and are tending recently dug graves on the set of Sergio Leone’s classic 1966 spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” making the area a pilgrimage site for movie fans.
The countryside near the town of Santo Domingo de Silos, about 200km north of Madrid in the province of Burgos, with its hills covered with heather-filled shrubs, represents the American Southwest in the epic story of the American Civil War.
The final film in the Dollars Trilogy, which catapulted actor Eastwood to international fame, appears on most all-time best film lists.
In 2015, a local cultural association launched a sponsorship campaign to rebuild the fictional Sad Hill Cemetery, the site of a famous showdown between Eastwood’s Man with No Name and the two rivals’ search for buried Confederate gold reserves.
The cemetery now contains over 5,000 graves.
Christine Guzman of the regional film commission said the renovation should attract fans to visit it, “creating a new pilgrimage center.”
Angel Sanchez, 63, from Toledo in central Spain, told Reuters he was considering whether to have his ashes interred there.
East of the cemetery is the Betterville Prison Camp, where the gunmen, played by Eastwood and Eli Wallach, are held after being captured by Union troops.
Betterville was rebuilt using juniper trunks that were burned in a fire in the surrounding natural park in 2022. The project received 50,000 euros in funding from the park and involved professional construction crews.
Last Sunday the re-builders celebrated the completion of the project.
Dressed in a union officer’s uniform, Sergio Garcia, a founding member of the Sad Hill Cultural Association, unveiled a plaque commemorating the hundreds of local artists who participated in the original production.
A man in the cemetery stood posing for a picture while the unforgettable song from Ennio Morricone’s film “Ecstasy of Gold” played on his portable speaker.
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