Los Albaricoques

Where it sits. Los Albaricoques is a hamlet of a couple of hundred people in the municipality of Níjar, in the dry interior of the Cabo de Gata-Níjar natural park, about forty kilometres east of Almería. It sits in a shallow basin of volcanic hills at the head of a rambla, surrounded by terraces of prickly pear, agave and abandoned dry-farmed almond, with the sea seven kilometres away over the ridge and invisible from the village. The houses are cubic and whitewashed with flat roofs, the streets are wide and dusty, and the whole place has the stripped-down geometry of the Almerían interior, which is exactly why it ended up on film.

The story behind it. Villages like this one were built for subsistence agriculture on marginal land — cereals, almonds, esparto grass gathered from the hills — supported by a handful of wells and by the aljibes, roofed cisterns that caught the rare torrential rain. The population drained away through the twentieth century, first to Catalonia and northern Europe, later to the greenhouse economy that has since covered the plain west of Níjar in plastic. What remains is a settlement small enough to walk in ten minutes, with a bar, a church and a scattering of holiday lets in restored houses. The wider area has a darker literary claim to fame: five kilometres away stands the ruined Cortijo del Fraile, the farmstead where a bride's elopement and the killing that followed in 1928 gave Federico García Lorca the plot of Blood Wedding.

On screen. In 1965 Sergio Leone chose Los Albaricoques for For a Few Dollars More, and the village played Agua Caliente, the Mexican town where El Indio's gang holes up after the bank robbery and where the film's circular final duel is set. Almería's combination of empty badlands, cheap crews and Spanish government incentives had already drawn A Fistful of Dollars to the province the year before, and over the following decade more than a hundred westerns were shot within an hour's drive, using the ramblas around Níjar and Rodalquilar, the sets at Tabernas and villages like this one for their Mexican interiors and dusty plazas. The Cortijo del Fraile and the abandoned gold-processing plant at Rodalquilar appear in several of them. Los Albaricoques has kept the connection alive in the plainest possible way: its streets are named after the directors and actors who worked here, so a visitor walks from Calle Sergio Leone into Calle Clint Eastwood, and panels around the village pair stills from the films with the exact corners where they were shot. Almería's western boom faded in the mid-1970s, when Italian production money moved on and the studios north of here began closing one by one, but the villages that hosted it never quite lost the habit: crews still turn up for commercials and music videos, and the province markets itself under the slogan of a land of cinema.

What you actually see today. This is a place for an hour rather than a day, and its pleasure is recognition: the whitewashed wall the camera tracked along, the low doorway a gunman backed through, the flat horizon closing the end of the street. Nothing has been rebuilt for tourism and nothing is ticketed. The village bar is the social centre and a reasonable stop for a beer and a plate of local cured pork before driving on. From here the rambla tracks run east toward the coast at Los Escullos and San José, and the mining landscape of Rodalquilar, with its abandoned cyanide tanks and its botanical garden, lies twenty minutes north-east — the combination of ghost industry, volcanic hills and film history makes a coherent day out of the park's interior, away from its beaches.

Getting there and timing. A car is the only sensible way in: the village is signposted off the AL-3108 between Níjar and San José, and Almería airport is about forty minutes away. There is no public transport worth planning around and no fuel, cash machine or shop beyond the bar, so arrive supplied. Spring is the season — the hills briefly green, the almond blossom gone over, the light hard and clean — while July and August bake the basin, with shade temperatures well above thirty-five degrees and no relief from the sea breeze this far inland. Bear in mind that people live here: the film locations are simply their streets, the panels stand outside occupied houses, and the village asks for the same discretion any small working community does — park on the edge, keep the noise down, and buy something at the bar.