La Calahorra.

〈italiano〉

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Many scenes of Sergio Leone’s films where trains and railway stations are present are filmed in this plain just south of Guadix, between Granada and Almeria.

The actual station, as well as the area where the various scenes were shot, is not located in the village but in the opposite direction, on the plain, in the middle of nowhere; the station is still active. La Calahorra is a village of 800 inhabitants topped by a beautiful castle built in the early 1500s.

In For a Few Dollars More Lee Van Cleef gets off the train, with his horse, to Tucumcari. The station was built specifically for this scene; it is in the plain, about one kilometer before the real railway station.

Coordinates: 37.224212, -3.032030

In the same area some scenes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly take place; here Tuco ties Sergeant Wallace to the tracks (practically the same shot of the Tucumcari station):

And here the transportation of the southern prisoners towards the northern camps; this is the station of La Calahorra:

In Once Upon a Time in the West some of the scenes were shot at La Calahorra station, which represents Flagstone station.

 

And now Flagstone. Many scenes of Once Upon a Time in the West were filmed on this set. There are the ruins of the main buildings. The place is near La Calahorra station; the road passes in the middle of the set.

 

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In Duck you Sucker the scene of the final battle takes place here in the plain. There are no more trace of the battle but the shot shows where the stone barricades were built. The location is the same as the Tucumcari station but the shot is taken in another direction.

 

Some pictures took in 2017.

The railway appears in almost all films; as we can clearly see it is a peace of an abandoned railway line; the mountains in the background are unmistakable.

The abandoned set of Once upon a time in the West.

In a sequence of For a few Dollars more, in the background, you can see the castle of La Calahorra.

And finally a couple of new photos of the trench of the final scene of Giù la Testa.

Here again in 2019

 

Same shot for three films: For a few dollars more, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West. This time I drove the track of the disused railway.

Unscheduled

As a side effect of a research I have done in this period I have watched over 70 films shot in the Comarca of Guadix.

First of all I discovered that the stretch of railway line used by Sergio Leone for many shots of his films was then used in many subsequent films.

I thought that Leone had been the first to use that abandoned railway section but in reality I also found previous films that used exactly the same area. For example, this is a frame of the 1959 North West Frontier film, directed by J. Lee Thompson, an English film set in India in the early 1900s.

The frame is a bit dark because it’s shot at dawn. However, it is identical to those already documented in the films of S.Leone.

Finally I found out, studying some articles about the history of the Spanish railways and carefully following the route on the maps, that that stretch of railway belonged to the transport line that connected the mine of Alquife (Minas del Marquesado), near the village of La Calahorra, at the main railway that is still active and passes precisely through La Calahorra station.