Esplugues.digital
By Pau Riba
September 13, 2026 ·
The return of the western market for Sant Mateu leads us to talk about a book by Eduardo Conejero that follows the adventures of the actors and specialists of the town beyond Esplugues
For the Festa Major de Sant Mateu, the craft market reminds us that Esplugues had a village in the West. But when Esplugas City disappeared, what happened to the actors and specialists who worked there? Eduardo Conejero has followed these trajectories in De profesión: duros. Actors of delivery and specialists of another time, of which the content advanced us and showed the exclusive cover in the stall of Sant Jordi d’Esplugues.digital. Now that the market will return to the streets of the city, we recover the conversation to meet some of the men who gave life to that Espluguí West.
Let’s start at the beginning. Conejero came to this book by a path quite far from the westerns : Perros callejeros. While researching the film for his first book, published in 2024, he discovered that some of the supporting actors had been specialists in Esplugas City. The daughter of one of them, Raúl Aparici, showed him some photographs that fascinated him. He was surprised that they had made films from the West so close to his home.
From there he was looking for actors, specialists and
family members. “I did a detective job to find them.” He was able to talk to
two of the actors still alive and reconstructed other lives with the memories
of the families. He also had the help of the cameraman Paco Marín Andreu and
the unpublished writings of the head of specialists Alberto Gadea.
The book collects anecdotes from the village and follows the careers of those who worked there. Among the stories he has recovered, Conejero has a weakness for Andarín’s. He had been a bullfighter and took advantage of his skills to work in the cinema. "I knew how to drive all kinds of vehicles or treat horses very well," he explains. He devotes a short chapter to it, because he admits that the information he has been able to find is limited.
There were also occasions when the work behind the camera
was combined with an appearance on the screen. Conejero remembers a councilman
as a Confederate soldier or the Italian director Tessari dancing in a scene
from El retorno de Ringo. "Well, a murderous dancer, huh? Be careful, be
careful," he said during the conversation. “It was a movie from another
time.”
The disappearance of the village did not put an end to the careers of those professionals. "They continued their careers and that's what I follow in the book," he explains. Conejero talks about Tarzan’s films in Vallvidrera, a Papiol that made Kathmandu and an Ebro delta turned into an African river. There were other roles and other shoots, often in very close landscapes. The book follows these trajectories for productions made in Catalonia between the sixties and eighties.
"It's the history of Catalan cinema," he defends. As calculated, 90% of the new book is about films made in Catalonia. And he especially presents the readers of Esplugues: "I feel that the people of Esplugues should know it". It is accompanied by a less solemn declaration: "The economic interest does not move me in the least, because otherwise I would dedicate myself to growing mussels, for example, which I would surely pay more attention to."
Those who want to discover this cinema, propose to start with El retorno de Ringo. He also recommends Arizona Pistolers and Los longos días de la venganza. "I'd first encourage them to watch these movies," he says.
Of profession: hard. Actores de reparto y specialists de
otra época has not yet been published, but it can already be booked on the
publisher’s website, in hardcover and for 25 euros. The publisher plans to
publish it in February 2027, an indicative date that may vary depending on
production and transport. Meanwhile, you can recover the complete interview
with Eduardo Conejero that we recorded for Sant Jordi at the Esplugues.digital
stall.
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