Between the years 1965 and 1972, two Catalan production companies made about seventy films of the spaghetti western genre in the West Bank. We’ll tell you about it.
Sapiens
Salvador Giné (text) / Àngel Comas (advice)
Spaghetti western producers:
[Montage with the posters of the films 'Doc, Manos de plata' (with the Italian title) and 'Dynamite Jim']
Between the years 1965 and 1972, two film production companies based in Barcelona made about seventy Western films (also called spaghetti western or euro-western, to differentiate it from the one produced in America). One, the production company Balcázar, owned by the director Alfonso Balcázar, had its studios in Esplugues de Llobregat, known as Esplugues City, a real western town. The other production company, with studies at the Paral·lel in Barcelona, also directed by Ignacio F. Iquino, took the name of his initials, IFI.
The interiors and street scenes were usually filmed in
their own studios, but the exteriors were missing, an environment capable of
making the viewer believe that they were actually looking at the plains and
stony gorges of the American Southwest. Until then, in the Peninsula only
Almeria and some very specific areas on the outskirts of Madrid (because of
their proximity) were used as exteriors for western films, but they were too
far from the studios in Barcelona. A closer place had to be found and this was
Fraga. How and who discovered it is unknown; however, the fact that the
national highway passed close to the future scenarios must have facilitated the
more or less accidental location.
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