Sad Hill Cemetery

About 30 kilometers southeast of Burgos, a charming city in the Castilla y León region of northern Spain, rests a rather expansive cemetery. The cemetery lies absolutely in the middle of nowhere. The small town of Santo Domingo de Silos, located 5 kilometers away, is the nearest semblance of civilization. Yet, amid the sun-kissed, arid hills, more than five thousand graves grace Sad Hill Cemetery. One might wonder who these individuals are, laid to rest so far from their homelands. As it turns out, Sad Hill Cemetery is not a real cemetery, but an intricately crafted movie set created to serve as the backdrop for the climactic scene of one of the most enduring spaghetti Westerns from the 1960s— The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . Photo credit: santiago lopez-pastor/Flickr Directed by the Italian director and producer Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was filmed mostly in Spain, in the rugged terrain of the Demanda mountains and the Arlanza valley near Burgos because of its geographic similarity to the Southwestern United States, where the story unfolds. The movie was shot at four key locations in the vicinity: the San Pedro de Arlanza monastery, which became the San Antonio mission hospital; the River Pisuerga in Hortigüela which became the site of the American Civil War battlefield in the film; the suburbs of Carazo, which were transformed into the extensive prison camp of Betterville; and Santo Domingo de Silos, which was turned into Sad Hill Cemetery. Measuring 300 meters in diameter and featuring more than 5,000 grave markers, the cemetery was built by several hundred Spanish soldiers. For every day of shooting during that scorching summer of 1966, the company paid each soldier 250 pesetas (€1.50), and some officials received as much as 900 pesetas (€5.41). Keen to show off their thespian skills, Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco even provided director Leone with 1,000 extras to work on the movie. The cemetery in 1966.