Cortina d'Ampezzo (Dolomites, Italy)
Beyond bursts of gunfire, chases, and explosions, the movie Maximum Risk ( Cliffhanger, 1993) is, above all, a fabulous alpine trompe l'oeil. Because what appears on the screen as the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado (USA) is, in reality, the abrupt and wild profile of the Dolomites, in northern Italy. The outdoor filming was concentrated in the surroundings of Cortina d'Ampezzo, such as in the Passo Falzarego or in one of the via ferratas in this area - such as that of Ivano Dibona -, which run through ridges and tunnels excavated in the rock during the World War, also fought in these vertical mountains. And how could it be otherwise in a film starring Sylvester Stallone, the suspension bridge that appears in the image above ends up jumping through the air (in fiction).
Indian beach (Ecola State Park, Oregon)
They called him Bodhi ( Point break ), by the later Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, put the surf bug in many viewers in the early 1990s. A cinematic adrenaline kick whose final scene, in which the protagonists (Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves) again supposedly meeting the wild surf of Bells beach, in Australia, actually shot on the sand of Indian beach, one of the beaches of Ecola State Park, in northern Oregon, whose network of coastal trails attracts numerous walkers, plus surfers and kayakers. Of course, the giant waves that swallow Bodhi in the last shots of the film really break the ocean inside: they were filmed in Waimea bay, in Hawaii.
Princess Street Gardens (Edinburgh, Scotland)
To escape the continuous bustle of Princess Street, one of the busiest shopping streets in the Scottish city, we can run - as Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and his friend Spud (Ewen Bremner) did along their sidewalk at the beginning of Trainspotting ( Danny Boyle, 1996) - or just take a leisurely walk to the nearby Princess Street Gardens, and then sit down and gaze out over Edinburgh's photogenic castle.
Ksar Ghilane (Tunisia)
It is not easy for tourists to reach the real scenes that hosted, in the Tunisian desert, the shooting of the intense romance narrated in the film The English Patient ( The English patient , 1996), by Anthony Minghella. But the infinite sea of dunes that extends from the Ksar Ghilane oasis, in the middle of the Sahara desert, in the south of the country, is a faithful reproduction of the one that the protagonist couple fly over in a small plane –interpreted by Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes–, and it is also much more accessible for visitors.
Baztan Valley (Navarra)
Beautiful and disturbing, like the very plot of the Baztán Trilogy, by the novelist Dolores Redondo, taken to the cinema twice by Fernando González Molina ( El guardián invisible , 2017, and Legado en los Osones , 2019), the landscape of the valley Baztan (valledebaztan.com), in the north of Navarra, with rolling green hills dotted with forests and small towns, invites you to be discovered. For example, through the thematic routes that are organized, in collaboration with the author of the novels, the web elguardianinvisible.com, and that they visit the settings where the films of the saga have been filmed, such as the town of Elizondo.
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