The Valle de Mirandilla
is a remote area in the south-eastern part of the province of Burgos, at 1,150
meters above sea level, it is located three kilometers south of the village of
Contreras (twelve kilometers south of the town of Salas de los Infantes), six
kilometers north of Carazzo and as many kilomers east of Santo Domingo de
Silos, which is located beyond the hills called Alto de los Cuetos. The fact
that the territory of this valley has belonged to these three distinct
communities since the Middle Ages has caused confusion about its denomination:
it is also known as Valle de Tierras de Carazo. Complex is also the question of
the denominations of the various parts of the Sierra that limits the valley on
the eastern side, known as Sierra Carazo (but also as Pena de Carazo or Pena de
Villanueva).
The northern part of the Sierra, which overlooks
the area where the set of the great Sad Hill Cemetery was built for the film “The
Good the Bad and the Ugly” (a zone apart from the Santo Domingo de Silos
territory), and it is called Alto de San Carlos (also Alto de Mirandilla)
(1,466 meters) and located in the territory of Carazo) developed a third part
of the sierra, which is called Sonla based on the design of the scenographer
Carlo Leva, was made in just three days , with the collaboration of 250
soldiers of the Spanish army stationed in Burgos, in a landfall in the northern
part of the Mirandilla valley, dominated by the steep limestone cliffs of Alto
de San Carlos.
It is the place where the treasure was sought by
the protagonists and is hidden where the final clash between the three
protagonists takes place: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach. The large
war cemetery, circular in shape, a sort of arena, an evident graft within the
Italian western of a typical element of the historical-mythological
cinematographic genre, from which Sergio Leone directly came, has a diameter of
about three hundred meters. It includes about three thousand mounds of earth
with crosses and tombstones made of wood and stone, simulating tombs, which in
the form of concentric circles and rays converge towards a central area (thirty
meters in diameter) paved with stones. The mounds, cleared now of vegetation,
and traces of the central stone area remain of the grandiose set of the Sad
Hill cemetery. The circular design of the whole area is well understood by
climbing the dirt road that leads to Santo
Domingo de Silos. A few meters from the entrance of
the enclosure that marks the beginning of the de Mirandilla, in a beautiful
panoramic position, with a pyramidal mountain in the north and the imposing
silhouette of Alto de San Carlos in the east, the set of a little church was
built as a ruin in which, after the battle of the Langstone bridge, Blonde
(Clint Eastwood) finds a dying young confederate soldier. Some traces of this
small set remain on the ground: the perimeter is scattered with fragments of
plaster.
At the beginning of the Mirandella valley, the
scene was shot in which Clint Eastwood manages to stop Tuco who is fleeing on
horseback by firing a cannon shot. South of the cemetery, the final scene “The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly” was filmed: Clint Eastwood's rides completely cross
the screen (from left to right) towards the slope of a hill covered with a
large reddish brown stain (it is a dense vegetation of heather bushes) and ends
with an extraordinary panoramic view from above, in a very long field, with the
silhouette of Sonocarazo (towards the village of Carazo) which appears very far
on the horizon. Exceptionally enhanced by Sergio Leone's film, the beautiful
Valle de Mirandilla had actually appeared on the screens a few years earlier in
a historic Spanish-American co-production film: “The Lions of Castile” (El
valle de los espadas: 1962), directed by Javier Seto and produced by Sidney
Pink with Espartaco Santoni, Cesar Romero, Broderick Crawford, Alida Valli
which was inspired by the epic poem that exalts the deeds of Fernan Gonzales,
first count of Castile, at the time of the wars against Castile, which was also
in its time a frontier territory, just like the American West, a borderland and
clashes between Christians perched in the north and Muslims pressing from the
south. The magnificent Mirandilla Valley of the Colectivo Arqueologico y
Palenontologico de Salas de los Infantes (Burgos)
has become an increasingly visited film location.
“The Castilian”
(1963)
“Sad Hill Chapel” (1966)
“Sad
Hill Cemetery”
unearthed (2016)
“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966)
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