By RAY KELLY
Orson Welles’ ashes were buried on the once private estate of his close friend, famed matador Antonio Ordóñez. Now, the ranch in Spain’s Malaga province is a highly desirable rental property with Welles’ grave used in marketing tools to draw guests.
Welles’ presence is featured in the online sales pitch made through Vrbo (Vacation Rental By Owners) to potential guests visiting Ronda, Andalusia: “Orson Welles, who was so captivated by this place that he rests forever in it, because the ashes of the illustrious filmmaker rest in the garden well.”
Seven different photos of his gravesite are featured in the property’s online photo gallery.
In addition to Welles’ grave, El Recreo de San Cayetano boasts an olive grove, fruit trees, orchard and pool on its nearly 25 acres. The house has five bedrooms, seven bathrooms and can sleep 10 visitors. It features a dining room with fireplace, kitchen, library, and massage room. (No children, pets, smoking or events allowed at the ranch.)
A single-night stay for two adults currently costs $657, excluding fees and taxes. Availability, rental rates and booking details can be found online at vrbo.com/6939944ha
Over the decades, guests to the Ordóñez family home have included such luminaries as flamenco dancer Lola Flores, Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa and another Ordóñez friend, Ernest Hemingway. The Vrbo online gallery features several photos of Hemingway now displayed in the Rondo home, including a framed photograph of the author positioned on a desk next to a manual typewriter.
Welles, who died on October 10, 1985 at the age of 70, had a lifelong love of Spain. His ashes were interred in a dry well at El Recreo de San Cayetano on May 7, 1987.
The brief ceremony was attended by Ordóñez, along with Welles’ youngest daughter, Beatrice, and Juan Cobos, the late director’s friend and assistant on Chimes at Midnight.
Ordóñez, who faced 3,000 bulls during his career, passed away in 1998 at the age of 66. Some of his ashes were added to the dry well.
In a 2015 interview, Beatrice Welles said her father never expressed a preference for his funeral arrangements or burial plans in conversations with his family. She and her late mother, Italian countess Paola Mori, chose Ronda as Welles’ final resting after much consideration. They rejected his birthplace of Kenosha, Wisconsin, or Hollywood, where he died, because he never felt he truly belonged in either of those communities.
“He was buried amongst people who really, really loved him for who he was – and not because he was Orson Welles,” she said at the time. “He truly loved southern Spain. He was at his happiest there.”
In September 2015, a monument honoring him was placed outside Ronda’s historic bullring. On the Welles monument, the plaque reads:
“A MAN IS NOT FROM WHERE HE WAS BORN BUT WHERE HE CHOOSES TO DIE”
AND RONDA WAS CHOSEN, HE WANTED TO BE A “RONDENO” FOREVER.
HIS ASHES WERE DEPOSITED HERE, IN EL RECREO DE SAN CAYETANO.
FOR ETERNITY — RONDA 2015
Welles may have been inspired by Spain’s bullfights and Hemingway’s 1960 articles in Life magazine when he came to write the unfilmed The Sacred Beasts, which a decade later became The Other Side of the Wind.
The aborted It’s All True, shot in 1942, featured a segment on bullfighting, My Friend Bonito.
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