For today's Geo Quiz we were looking for Europe's only desert. The answer is the Tabernas Desert, in southern Spain. The desert is home to a town by the same name. And that town served as a movie set for some classic Hollywood Westerns. The World's Gerry Hadden visited the town of Tabernas to see if the old magic is still there.

The older residents of Tabernas still remember when Gary Cooper, John Wayne and a young Clint Eastwood rode into town to rustle horses and swig tequila here. Antonio Uveda Gonzales was a kid at the time. A kid, and an extra on dozens of movie sets. He says the desert bloomed with activity whenever Hollywood showed up.

Gonzalez: "We dressed up however they wanted us to dress. As Arabs, as cowboys. It was great fun. They didn't pay us much since we were just kids but we had a blast. It was a new world that we knew nothing about."

That world left tiny Tabernas behind decades ago. All that remains of Hollywood are the memories, and the perfectly preserved wild west sets. In one faux frontier town, a gallows stands in a dusty square in front of the facades of a saloon and a bank.

Each evening at 7:30 a bunch of pretend cowboys get drunk at the bar here, steal gold from the bank vault then get shot by the sheriff.

Rough riders of Tabernas - photo: Gerry Hadden

Tourists pile in daily to see these staged gunfights. But its clear the show could use a little direction. One of the actors is Diego. He plays an uninspired bad guy.

Diego:This job?, it's so-so. The only thing I like is that I get to ride a horse. You saw the show, didn't you? he says sheepishly."

Absent from today's crowd are locals from Tabernas. Turns out most of them are back in town, watching a decidedly unwestern film.

As night falls hundreds of people sit in the town plaza, watching the new Simpsons movie projected on the wall of the church. Afterwards, two local teenagers, Sandra and Alicia, say they'd take Bart Simpson over Yule Brunner any day.

Sandra says, we appreciate the old westerns because they were filmed here. But if I'm bored at home I wouldn't think to pick one out at the video store.

Westerns may be fading from the town's collective psyche , but the fact remains that Tabernas was never richer, never happier, than when Hollywood was here. Today the population is about 3,000 - half of what it was in the 1960s. Some are betting on films once again to bring Tabernas back to life.

photo: Gerry Hadden

In a non-descript building on the edge of town a documentary film maker is trying to revive the town's film heritage. Director Manuel Borrego says Tabernas, the real place, fell victim to the same boom-town mentality featured in so many of the films here. A lot of money came in very fast, he says, but none of it stayed.

Borrego: Curiously, in the glory days of the movie industry, when they filmed something like 300 films here, town leaders never thought to build a permanent movie studio! So the productions came, and went. Because productions can't exist if all you have to offer is the landscape."

Borrego hopes to change that. He's running the newly inaugurated film school in Tabernas . Some thirty students have been chosen to help bring film and TV production back to the desert. One student, Mario, points out that the desert can be more than a backdrop for Westerns. He says music videos, commercials even road movies could be made here.

Mario: "If they start making films in the desert again I'd hope it would be something a la Quentin Tarantino."

Courses at the new Tabernas film school are forward looking. They include digital editing, and digital camera techniques. But just in case, students can also study what once worked so well for Tabernas... set design.

For The World I'm Gerry Hadden, Tabernas Spain