Andalusia on Film: from Lawrence of Arabia to Game of Thrones

Lawrence of Arabia (1962): Seville and the desert of Almería

David Lean’s epic, with Peter O’Toole as T. E. Lawrence and Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali, won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and much of it was made in Andalusia. Seville played Cairo, Jerusalem, Deraa and Damascus, and the province of Almería became the deserts of the Near East.

In Seville, the Andalucía Film Commission lists the Plaza de España, which stood in for Damascus as General Allenby rides into the city, along with the Real Alcázar, the Plaza de América, the Casino de la Exposición, the Casa de Pilatos and the Hotel Alfonso XIII. In Almería, the crew filmed in the Tabernas desert, on the beach of El Algarrobico, in the Parque Nicolás Salmerón by the port and in the dunes of Cabo de Gata, where the train is blown up and the horsemen charge.

To stand in the scene, start at the Plaza de España in the Parque de María Luisa, then walk on to the Real Alcázar. The desert locations are a day’s drive from Almería city.

The Plaza de España →   Hotel Alfonso XIII →

The Dollars trilogy: the Tabernas desert, Europe’s Wild West

Almería’s cinema history would not exist as we know it without Sergio Leone. His Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), made the dry valleys of Tabernas the home of the spaghetti western. Leone was so taken with the landscape that he shot most of his second western here, and for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly he brought in Eli Wallach to play Tuco beside Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, with Ennio Morricone’s famous score.

The film commission’s Dollars route takes in the Tabernas desert, the Cortijo del Fraile farmhouse near Níjar, the Cortijo El Sotillo and the dunes of Cabo de Gata. Some of the old western sets in the desert survive as visitor attractions, with saloons, sheriff’s offices and stunt shows. The trilogy’s famous final duel was filmed far to the north, in the province of Burgos.

Almería and Cabo de Gata: the back story →

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989): Mónsul, Almería and Guadix

Steven Spielberg’s third Indiana Jones film introduced Sean Connery as Henry Jones senior, Indy’s father, and it is the film of the series that drew the biggest audience in Spanish cinemas. Spielberg and his team chose the locations from the air, by helicopter. He turned down the Alhambra, which he felt was too familiar to pass for somewhere else.

The great scene is on Mónsul beach in the Cabo de Gata natural park, where Connery scatters a flock of seagulls with his umbrella to bring down a German fighter plane. The Alcazaba of Almería and the Tabernas desert also appear, and in the province of Granada the streets of Guadix played the Turkish port of Iskenderun.

Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park →

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002): the Plaza de España as Naboo

George Lucas needed a palace for the planet Naboo, and found one in Seville. The great semicircle of the Plaza de España, built for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, with its canal, bridges and tiled benches for every province of Spain, became the city of Theed, where Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) walk together.

Come early in the morning, before the heat and the crowds, when the light falls across the colonnade.

Game of Thrones: Dorne in Seville, and the dragons of Andalusia

HBO came to Andalusia for three seasons. For the fifth, the Real Alcázar of Seville became the palace of Dorne and its Water Gardens, with their tiled courtyards, fountains and orange trees, and the bullring in Osuna was filled with extras for the fighting pit of Meereen. More than 85,000 people applied to be extras in Seville and Osuna, and some 500 took part in the filming. Emilia Clarke celebrated her birthday in Osuna during the shoot, with a cake bearing the arms of House Targaryen and hundreds of extras singing to her in Spanish and English.

Later seasons brought the crews back. The Andalucía Film Commission’s route also takes in the Reales Atarazanas, Seville’s old shipyards, the Roman ruins of Itálica at Santiponce, the castle of Almodóvar del Río and the Roman bridge in Córdoba, the Alcazaba of Almería, the Tabernas desert, the cliffs of Mesa Roldán and El Chorrillo in the Sierra Alhamilla, where the producers reused sets built for Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings.

During the seventh season the cast stayed at the Hotel Alfonso XIII in Seville, where fans gathered at the doors every day, and one night the actors ordered pizzas and handed them out to the crowd themselves.

The Real Alcázar of Seville →

Die Another Day (2002): Bond in Cádiz

Pierce Brosnan’s last Bond film needed Havana, and the old port of Cádiz, with its Spanish colonial streets and seafront, stood in for the Cuban capital. The famous scene of Halle Berry, as Jinx, rising from the sea was filmed at La Caleta, the little beach between the city’s two castles. It was a cold, windy day, and Berry later recalled how icy the Atlantic was as she shot the scene again and again.

Brosnan, for his part, fell for the food of the coast, and above all for tortillitas de camarones, the crisp little shrimp fritters of Cádiz.

There is no official trailer for this film on the studio’s or distributor’s own channels, so we do not embed one.

Marshland (2014): Andalusia’s own thriller

Some of the finest films shot in Andalusia are Andalusian. Alberto Rodríguez’s La isla mínima (Marshland), a dark police thriller set in 1980, follows two detectives hunting a killer in the marshes of the Guadalquivir, and the rice fields of Isla Mayor, south of Seville, are its haunting backdrop. It swept the Goya Awards, winning ten, including Best Film.

Andalusia has given Spanish cinema many of its stars, none better known than Antonio Banderas, who was born in Málaga and has returned to the city to produce theatre.

The festivals: Málaga, Seville and Marbella

The Festival de Málaga, held each spring, is the great showcase of cinema in Spanish. It began in 1998 as a festival of Spanish film and, from its 20th edition, opened to the whole Spanish-speaking world, with its golden Biznaga, named after Málaga’s jasmine posy, as the top prize.

Each November the Seville European Film Festival, run by the city council, brings the best new European cinema to the city. On the coast, the Marbella International Film Festival is on our sister guide in Marbella, with the town’s cinemas and its summer screenings under the stars.

Cinemas and the film festival in Marbella →

Our advice

Watch Lawrence of Arabia before Seville, and save Almería for the westerns and Indiana Jones: the desert, the dunes and the beach at Mónsul fit into a long day from the city. Go in spring or autumn; the Tabernas desert is fierce in summer.

Over to you. Which Andalusian film do you love, and which scene would you add? Tell us below or in our forum: we read every message, and the best suggestions will join this page.

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