Spaghetti Western Locations

Continuing with locations from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. After Blondie and Tuco’s battle with the cannons, Tuco is sent flying with Blondie’s last salvo. He ends up rolling and hitting his head on a large flat rock. He looks up and determines it’s a grave marker (that marker now flat with the surrounding ground is still there). Tuco get’s to his feet and he and the audience get their first glimpse of Sad Hill Cemetery. This cemetery, with thousands of graves, was built for Sergio Leone by the Spanish Army. Dirt was brought in and made into mounds. The mounds are smaller the further you are from the center of the cemetery. This gives the effect of an even more enormous cemetery. Since the dirt was brought in it contained seeds not indigenous to the area and now the graves are covered with a different ground cover then the surrounding cow pasture. If you drive past the entrance where a monument has been constructed and up the hill behind the location you can look down and see the entire cemetery much as it may have looked when the movie was filmed. No crosses or their remains are left. The stones at the cemetery’s center are now grown over with grass. Still when I was there in 2003 and 2005 we talked in whispers as if this were a real cemetery. Like the Mission San Antonio it is one of the most revered of all Leone locations.

For a more detailed view of this site and other Spaghetti Western locations please visit my friend Yoshi ‘Garringo’ Yasuda’s excellent website: http://garringo.cool.ne.jp/