It’s the dream of many movie buffs: owning the piece of land where great classic films were shot. In Spain, the site on which “Play Me the Song of Death” was created is now for sale – for a manageable sum.
A most unusual piece of land has just come onto the market in Spain. The real estate agent Grupo Rukasa is offering a property of almost 90,000 square meters in the desert of Almería. The special thing about the site: Well-known films were made here, including the Italo-Western “Play me the song of death” with Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale and Henry Fonda.
“Play me the song of death” is now considered one of the greatest westerns ever made. It has been ranked among the 100 best films of all time in numerous lists. Above all, the opus filmed in 1968 by the Italian director Sergio Leone is now considered a classic among spaghetti westerns. A genre that – as the name suggests – originated in Italy in the 1960s.
Italian directors like Sergio Leone shot in Spain
But the name is a bit misleading. Because often only the interior shots took place in the Roman Cinecittà studios. Directors like Leone or Sergio Corbucci (“Django”) were happy to switch to Spain for the outdoor shots. The dusty landscape of Andalusia was best suited to portray the barren desert landscape of the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin, where many of their stories are set.
And so some of the most famous spaghetti westerns in the land of paella, gazpacho and tortilla came to be. This also applies to the almost three-hour epic “Play me the song of death”, in the original “Once Upon a Time in the West”, which also enjoys cult status thanks to the congenial film music by Ennio Morricone.
The wave of spaghetti westerns ebbed away in the 1970s, but important films were still made in the Andalusian desert later on. In 1989, for example, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”, and in the noughties “The Shoe of Manitou” was filmed here. The latter in Fort Bravo near Tabernas, which is one of three studios still in use. The other two, Oasys (this is where “A Fistful of Dollars” was filmed) and Western Leone, are only used for tourist purposes.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way: who knows what the new buyer is planning. For the price of 2.8 million euros you can buy a piece of film history. Or you can build a new future with it.
More information is available on the website of the real estate agency Grupo Rukasa
