Grouper, the fastest location hunter in the West... in Granada and Almeria: "It gives you a rush to find where a scene was recorded."

 NIUS

By Javier García Padilla

7/6/2023

[Image of Mero in one of the villages used for the films.]

A single frame, a millisecond and Mero is already able to identify the mountain on which Clint Eastwood rides in any Western movie. At 48 years old, this chef by profession is a location hunter by vocation who has tracked every 'spaghetti western' shot in Spain to know exactly where it was recorded.

His love for westerns was born years ago in a small town in Granada called Pedro Martínez. There his uncle was the owner of a cinema in which Mero watched the films of the Wild West that was only a few kilometers from home. After Madrid, Almeria and some towns of Granada were the scene of most of the great classics of the genre.

However, it was not until 2019 when he began to look for those scenarios and all because of 'For a Few Dollars More'. He had seen the film many times and always asked himself the same question: where had they filmed the scene in which Lee Van Cleef stops a train? I knew it had been at the Calahorra station in Granada, but that was not enough for Mero, he wanted to know the exact place.

[Scene from “For a Few Dollars More” and its location.

"I found an old photo of the place on the Internet and that's what guided me," he tells NIUS. For hours he was walking around the station, looking for angles and references, but nothing fit. In the end, after much walking around, following the old train track he found the site four kilometers from the station.

"It gives you a rush to find it," says Mero, and pursuing that feeling he was looking for more and more scenarios with the help of his friend Francisco Arco. "We have located almost all the filming locations that have been in Granada," says Mero, who from then on began only one new mission: to locate those in Almeria.

 "There are locations there all over the province," he explains to NIUS. That’s far from being an advantage can be a problem. "At first it was harder for me," says Mero, "now I use Google Maps and it's easier." As a good gunslinger, he does not waste bullets until he has his target within range. Until it has more or less located the site, it does not move. "Sometimes I've gone for nothing thinking I knew where I was and that makes me very angry."

[A frame next to its location.]

But it also has its tricks. "For the filming they needed to move very heavy film crews," Mero explains, "so they usually chose locations close to roads or highways." In this way the vehicles could reach almost the same place of the filming. That maxim has helped him in almost all his searches.

However, there was a 1967 film, 'John the Bastard', that brought him upside down. "I immediately realized that it had been recorded in Granada when I saw the hill in the background in a shot that lasts a thousandth of a second," says Mero. However, it took much longer to find the exact place.

 

[Scene from the movie 'John the Bastard' and its location.]

"It's the scene that brought me the most headaches," he confesses to NIUS, "it became an obsession for me." For a long time, he was trying to find the place, but the terrain had changed too much and to reach it it was necessary to travel with the one that did not give... But in the end he succeeded.

He has already managed to identify hundreds of locations but tracking among the more than 160 Western films he has at home. "I put them on a big television and pass them little by little, from ten seconds to ten seconds, to look for places," he explains, "some I have not seen because what really fascinates me are the locations."

Then on his Facebook page, Once Upon A Time, Mero hangs the photograph of the exact place next to the frame of the film and thus, little by little, a legion of followers enjoys each of his publications. More than 25,000 people are already following the fastest location hunter in the West.