A team of engineers and scientists has brought a machine from the future to the Tabernas desert in Almería, Spain. In a landscape familiar to fans of Sergio Leone westerns, before the sun had truly warmed the ground, they lifted Charlie onto a small cart — the prototype rover that the European Space Agency (ESA), Airbus, and much of European industry and science have been designing for years. They took it to an area that alternated between very fine dusty soil, rocky scree and salt-encrusted ground. They wanted to test how the machine would cope in an environment as close as possible to Mars. That is the ultimate goal of the ExoMars mission to which it belongs: to reach the Martian surface in 2030 — after more than a year of space travel — with the first European rover to touch down there, and drill into it in search of past or present life on the red planet. At least in the dry Almería scrub, Charlie seems to have convinced the scientists.

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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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