Advertisement

Showdown cemetery from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly rebuilt to become a pilgrimage site

The refurbished cemetery in northern Spain is intended to attract fans of the classic 1966 spaghetti Western starring Clint Eastwood

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Angel Sanchez, 63, walks through the Sad Hill cemetery - the site of the classic shoutout scene in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - in Santo Domingo de Silos, Burgos province, Spain, on September 8, 2024. A local association has attracted thousands of fans to the area after renovating original sets used in the movie. Photo: Reuters

There are two types of people in the world, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name tells a rival gunslinger who has no bullets: those with a loaded gun, and those who dig. “You dig.”

Advertisement

Volunteers in northern Spain have taken his words to heart, painstakingly tending the freshly dug graves on sets featured in Sergio Leone’s classic 1966 spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to make the area a pilgrimage site for movie fans.

With its rolling hills of heather-strewn shrub land, the countryside near the town of Santo Domingo de Silos, some 200km (125 miles) north of Madrid in Burgos province, stood in for the American Southwest in the epic set during the US civil war.

Advertisement

The last instalment in the Dollars Trilogy that propelled actor Eastwood to international stardom is a fixture in most all-time best movie lists.

Luciano Maldonado Moreno (left) holds a pistol at the Sad Hill cemetery in Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, on September 8, 2024. Photo: Vincent West
Luciano Maldonado Moreno (left) holds a pistol at the Sad Hill cemetery in Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, on September 8, 2024. Photo: Vincent West

In 2015, a local cultural association launched a sponsorship drive to reconstruct the fictional Sad Hill Cemetery, site of a famed showdown between Eastwood’s Man with No Name and two rivals for a hoard of buried Confederate gold.

Advertisement