.Westerns...All'Italiana!: Spaghetti Western Location ~ Oasys (Mini Hollywood)

Friday, June 7, 2019

Spaghetti Western Location ~ Oasys (Mini Hollywood)

About a kilometer north of the Callejones bridge and five kilometers from Tabernas, a few hundred meters from the road from Almeria to Murcia, it was built as the city El Paso in "For a Few Dollars More" (1965), a large set was built based on a design by the architect Carlo Simi and the supervision of the scenographer Carlo Leva. He works, on the ground of cortijo Gennaro, in a very panoramic position, begin at the end of May 1965. The project contained many large buildings of wood, cement and brick. It was also suitable for interior shots: the bank on the western side of the square and, on the opposite side, the sheriff's office and jail with the characteristic facade culminating in three semicircles; the saloon-hotel where Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) stayed on the north side and the hotel in which Clint Eastwood stayed is on the south side (with Mount Alfaro in the background). The great set was then used in many films until the 1970s; but, with the decay of the western genre, it risked going completely into ruin. At the beginning of the 1980s this complex was restructured to make it a theme park called Mini Hollywood; a western village as a tourist attraction, in which stuntmen recreate scenes and situations characteristic of that type of cinema (duels, chases, shootouts and fights) every day, and in an adjacent area a large zoo with exotic animals was also created. The complex is today called the Paras Tematico Oasys.

This great set, therefore, was connected to the tourist development on the coast of Almeria which was beginning in the 1980s. An operation which, combined economic, cultural, and cinematographic interests that were used for filming helped to preserve a set that would otherwise have disappeared, like many others. Among the westerns shot on this set include:

“$100,000 for Lassiter” (1965); “The Relentless Four” (1965); “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966); “A Woman for Ringo” (1966); “Navajo Joe” (1966) (in which it represents Esperanza City; this set was combined with the western village of De Laurenti south of Rome); “A Taste for Killing” (1966) (representing Omaha City; the wooden bridge was also used); “Sugar Colt” (1966) (representing the town of Snake Valley); “Dynamite Joe” (1967); “For a Few Bullets More” (1968); “Ace High” (1968); “Fifteen Scaffolds for a Killer” (1968); “I Came, I Saw, I Shot” (1968); “Sledge” (1970); “Doc” (1971); “Hannie Caulder” (1971); “The Ballad of Ben and Charlie” (1972); “Sonny & Jed” (1972); “Massacre at Fort Holman” (1972); “The Spike’s Gang” (1973); “The Man Called Noon” (1973); “Shanghai Joe” (1973); “The White, the Yellow, the Black” (1974); “The Stranger and the Gunfighter” (1974); “Whiskey and Fantasy” (1974); “Spaghetti Western” (1975) (in this film it appears as a city of an oil field; you can also see the bridge); “California” (1977) (ued as a ghost town); “Buddy Goes West” (1981) (represents Yucca City); “Al este del Oeste” (1984); La luz de la primera Estrella (2004).