A Fistful of Dollars is a 1964 spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone and the first film in the Dollars Trilogy. Clint Eastwood stars as a nameless drifter who arrives in a violent border town and plays two rival families against each other for his own profit and survival. Loosely inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the film helped reshape the western by making it rougher, more cynical and more stylised than the classic Hollywood model. With Eastwood’s minimalist performance, Ennio Morricone’s distinctive score and Leone’s extreme close-ups and slow-burn tension, it became one of the defining westerns of the 1960s.
The film was shot in Spain, using Madrid-area western sets and the dry landscapes of Almería to stand in for the American-Mexican borderlands. Much of the town material was filmed at the now-vanished Golden City set in Hoyo de Manzanares, north-west of Madrid, while additional filming took place around Aldea del Fresno, Casa de Campo in Madrid and CEA Studios. The production also used locations in what is now the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park in Almería, giving the film its harsher, dustier desert atmosphere. Rather than trying to recreate the American West in a traditional Hollywood style, the film builds its world from Spanish badlands, frontier sets and stark Mediterranean light, which became central to the visual language of the spaghetti western.
Cortijo El Sotillo
Cortijo El Sotillo has been used in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Desafío en Río Bravo (1964), Johnny Yuma (1966) and "Day of Anger" (1967).
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