There was a time, when the Spanish film industry was less buoyant, but the country itself was much in demand for locations - Lawrence of Arabia, Cleopatra, Doctor Zhivago... The golden age of film-set Spain was the sixties and its capital was Almeria. The nearby Tabernas desert, the only true desert in Europe, was a magnet to film producers, and a number of the sets that were used at the time can now be visited.

Mini-Hollywood, is the longest established of three theme parks existing in the area. The other two, Western Leone and Texas Hollywood, are still working locations, at least some of the time, but Mini-Hollywood is now entirely given over to the theme-park business. Its heart is a Wild-West set, what one calls "your standard Spaghetti-Western town." And most of it is deliciously, authentically false - real, phoney buildings that were actually used in films. Some of the movies that were shot here are legendary: Sergio Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy ('A Fistful of Dollars', 'For a Few Dollars More' and 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly') starring Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, 'Django' with Franco Nero, the sequels to which never seemed to end... over a hundred titles were at least partially filmed in these dusty streets.

Almeria was also used as a location for other film genres after the sixties (Patton, The Wind and the Lion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade...) but it was the spaghetti-western that really defined the relationship between the province and the film industry. Mini Hollywood is a great day out for the whole family with theme park rides, good cheap food, a zoo and good local transport to get you there and back.