Villa Ciscarejo Country house between orange groves in Gádor (Almería)

The arid landscape and desert climate were the primary factors that made Almería a center of Western films and gave rise to the first Western villages. The Taste of Vengeance and Death First were the first productions, followed by Cleopatra and King of Kings, to use this desert as the backdrop for the devil's seduction of Jesus. A few scenes from the classic Lawrence of Arabia were also filmed in the Tabernas countryside, but without a doubt, it was director Sergio Leone who put this area in the spotlight with his Spaghetti Westerns.

In the 1960s, this genre also featured films such as A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and arguably his greatest project, Once Upon a Time in the West, starring Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, and Charles Bronson. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, director Stanley Kubrick used this area for the lunar landscape in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film about Patton, one of America's most famous generals, was also filmed in this area. Later, Steven Spielberg shot scenes from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade in this Tabernas Desert.