One Spanish region where tourists are welcome – especially spaghetti western fans | Spain holidays

In the mountains of northern Spain, the sleepy town of Santo Domingo de Silos is accustomed to welcoming pilgrims. In the province of Burgos, on the Camino de Santiago, it is home to one of Spain’s most famous monasteries.

Built in the seventh century, the abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos was catapulted to unlikely stardom in 1994 when its monks had a surprise chart hit with an album of Gregorian chant that sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. The proceeds went towards restoration of the crumbling structure, which was carried out by local builders.

When the world’s gaze moved on, Santo Domingo returned to its sombre life, its hushed streets disturbed only by the toll of the monastery bell and the footsteps of the Camino walkers. So far, so regular a pilgrim’s tale … until 2015, when another grassroots restoration project put Santo Domingo back into the spotlight, and launched a pilgrimage of a different nature.

On the edge of town, surrounded by limestone mountains, the long-abandoned Sad Hill cemetery was restored by a local community and a group of enthusiasts from around the world, who spent two years digging it out from under seven inches of earth. However, this is no ordinary cemetery: it contains no corpses and its gravestones are fictitious. It is in fact the film set from the legendary closing scene of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Sergio Leone’s 1966 masterpiece.

Built for the movie by the Spanish army, the set was abandoned after filming, returned to pasture and ultimately reclaimed by nature. The restoration of its stone plaza, surrounded by 5,000 graves in concentric circles, was an immense feat of determination, devotion and human toil, drawing support from fans including James Hetfield of rock band Metallica, and the film’s leading man, Clint Eastwood. Launched in 2016, and the subject of a Netflix documentary about the restoration, Sad Hill is now firmly on the tourist map, but remains refreshingly uncommercial, something created by fans, for fans.

Now, there’s even more to draw Leone devotees here: the Asociación Cultural Sad Hill has created a new, 21-mile (34km) circular hiking trail, Ruta el Bueno, el Feo y el Malo, connecting the cemetery to three other locations from the film: the Betterville prison camp, near the village of Carazo, the monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza, which represented the Mission of San…