He had a solution for everything. There was no problem he couldn’t tackle. Whether it was forcing open a lock by melting ice, building a defibrillator out of two candlesticks and a microphone cable, making a bomb with a stick of chewing gum or defusing one with a paper clip. He could even stop a sulfuric acid leak with milk chocolate bars. As a popular Spanish saying inspired by the character goes: “You’re more dangerous than MacGyver in a hardware store.”

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In the late 1960s, Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone arrived in the province of Almería to shoot the film Once Upon a Time in the West. He was blown away by the landscape, but the desert alone wasn’t enough: his production team built a set designed by Carlo Simi that included several buildings and a railroad. It was christened Rancho Leone and has since hosted many other shoots for the legendary Spaghetti Westerns, as well as TV series, music videos, and advertising campaigns. Pedro Almodóvar also stopped by in 2023 to shoot Strange Way of Life with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. Today, this set, which has fallen into disrepair due to lack of maintenance, is on the market for €1.6 million ($1.84 million). “We’re getting older, and we’re tired. It had a really great run, but we just can’t handle all this anymore,” says Genara Rubio, the manager and owner of the site, at the entrance to the facilities.

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