Where to film a western or horse scenes outside the US?

For a classic frontier town with saloons and a main street, the ready-built sets of Almería are hard to beat. For a western, an eastern, a historical epic or any story where horses carry the action through wild country, Kyrgyzstan gives you the landscape, the animals and the riders in one place, without fencing, power lines or tourists in the background.

• Tabernas Desert, Almería, Spain: more than 300 films since the late 1950s, including Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. Three western towns still stand: Fort Bravo, Oasys MiniHollywood and Western Leone.
• Durango, Mexico: over 150 projects, mostly westerns; John Wayne made five films there.
• Monument Valley, Utah and Arizona: John Ford's backdrop from Stagecoach (1939) to The Searchers.
• New Mexico: a film tax credit from 25% up to 40% with uplifts.
• The Soviet eastern: the western moved to the steppe and the desert; White Sun of the Desert (1970) is the classic. Kazakhstan's Nomad (2005) put about 2,000 extras on screen.

• Horses are part of daily life. 566,000 horses at the end of 2025, almost twice as many as in 1990, with the most in the Naryn region. In summer, herds graze on the high pastures around Son-Kul and Suusamyr, and you can shoot them without bringing a single animal in a trailer.
• The riders are real. Kok boru, two teams on horseback fighting for a goat carcass, was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List in 2017. Long-distance races are part of every festival: at the 2026 World Nomad Games the alaman chabysh ran 25 km.
• Nomad camps exist. Herders still move to summer pastures with yurts. For the 2018 World Nomad Games an ethnic village of more than 800 yurts stood in the Kyrchyn gorge, and the 2026 Games brought around 3,000 athletes to Bishkek and Issyk-Kul.
• Eagles and falcons. Hunting with birds of prey is part of UNESCO's falconry element, and Kyrgyzstan is among the countries listed.

• Kurmanjan Datka: Queen of the Mountains (2014): a historical epic with battle scenes; period sets were built in the Osh region, and 60 Semirechye Cossacks played the Russian troops.
• Centaur (2017) by Aktan Arym Kubat, about a man who steals racehorses at night: Berlinale Panorama, CICAE Art Cinema Award, Kyrgyzstan's Oscar entry.
• Netflix's Home Game (2020), the episode on kok boru.
• Beyond the Silk Road (2026): Dominic West and Clarke Peters cross mountain passes mostly on horseback.
• Seven Tribes, Seven Fathers (2024) with kok boru and eagle hunting, and Human Playground (2022) on salbuurun hunting.

On international productions horse work is run by a horse master or head wrangler: they source and prepare the horses, train actors to ride, plan the stunts and assess the risks. Their main request is time for preparation. Guidelines followed on many productions (American Humane) ask, among other things, for riders to dismount between setups, no trip wires, only trained horses for falls and rears, a vet check when large groups of horses are brought together, limited takes, rest and backup horses. We build horse days into the schedule with these rules from the start and bring in a horse master and stunt riders for the project.

No ready-built frontier town: saloons, a main street and a railway station have to be built or dressed. No saguaro cacti and no cave towns. The high pastures are a summer location, roughly June to September; in winter the same valleys are under snow, which is its own kind of western.