Spaghetti Western Location ~ Rambla de los Bancos (Fonelos)

In the northernmost part of the municipal territory of Fonelas, about eighteen kilometers north of the city of Guadix, lies a small beautiful valley (Rambla de los Bancos) which was chosen as the location for some westerns in the mid-1960s. Beside the NE-36 road (leading to Banos de Alicun de las Torres). Access to the location is blocked by a chain. Beyond lies a picturesque gorge (opposite Cerro Mencal, which rises to the west, on the other side of the Rio Fardes valley) in which erosion has created bizarre geometric shapes, one enters a small valley bordered by arid hills at whose bottom lies a complex of picturesque messas (Loma de la Sepultura) developed, similar to those of New Mexico. Unlike other Spanish natural scenes subsequently changed or distorted by transformations or environmental interventions, this small hidden valley keeps intact the fascination it revealed in “Seven Guns for the MacGregors” (1965) (in the sequence in which the MacGregor brothers succeed in trucking a big load with silver ingots) and in “Up  the MacGregors” (1966) (in which it represents the Gola del Sol, the access to the lair of the Mexican bandit Maldonado, through which passes the wagon of the itinerant dentist / Victor Isreal and then Rosita Carson / Agata Flori). This location was also used in a sequence with Burt Reynolds in "Navajo Joe", filmed at the end of May 1966, and with different angles compared to the previous films, in some scenes of the movie “The Taste of Vengeance (1968).

“Seven Guns for the MacGregors” (1965)

 

“Up  the MacGregors” (1966)

“Navajo Joe” (1966)

“The Taste of Vengeance” (1968)