Spain is way ahead of us... WAY ahead!
The show began, as the movies it mimics often do, when a stranger rode into town.
The horses reared, kicking up dust. Punches were thrown, shots fired, insults slung. Three sheriffs stood against three outlaws: dark waistcoats versus khaki duster jackets. A sheriff heaved himself off a balcony onto a bale of hay on the ground. An outlaw swung off his saddle and clung sideways to his galloping horse. Another flailed from the hangman’s noose, and, before going limp, waved goodbye to the tourists who had clustered to watch the shootout from the porches and balconies of the bank, the sheriff’s office, the saloon, and the hotel surrounding the square. Coyote howls and soul-shaking leitmotifs blared from loudspeakers while kids in cowboy costumes shook toy guns at each other. As the gunfire continued, some of the kids laughed, others cried. “Oye! Estamos jugando!” a sheriff yelled. Hey, we’re just playing!
Welcome to Oasys MiniHollywood—a movie set-turned-Wild West theme park in Southern Spain, on the fringe of Europe’s only desert. The Tabernas could be mistaken for New Mexico, Texas or Arizona. For years it was, most famously as the solitary expanse at the heart of the Italian director Sergio Leone’s classic Dollars trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966). With their ironic humor, moral ambivalence, and operatic scope, the films not only made Clint Eastwood a poncho-wearing, gun-slinging icon but also came to define the genre known as the spaghetti western. Leone’s Dollars movies were an audacious ode to an America that he had first known through the Hollywood films of his Roman childhood.
http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2018/wild-west-in-spain/
(and yes, it is my lifelong goal to someday throw myself into Lee Van Cleef's open grave)...
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