Raquel Welch: The icon who showed the Canary Islands to the world dies aged 82

The movie world is mourning the passing of legendary actress, Raquel Welch, who died yesterday morning (Wednesday) at the age of 82 at home in Los Angeles after a brief illness. Welch showed the Canaries to the world in the 1960s before the islands were a regular location for filming.

One of the biggest films of the decade was One Million Years BC, which was released in 1966 and starred a 26-year-old Raquel Welch, who would become an icon as a result of it, partly due to the advertising poster that became even more famous than the film itself.

The exterior shots of the movie were filmed in mid-winter in Gran Canaria, in the Timanfaya National Park and Cueva de los Verdes in Lanzarote, and in the Teide National Park, in Tenerife, but it was her experiences on Mount Teide that Welch focused on in an interview in 2017 with Fox News.

“We were so far from civilization. I mean, there was a hotel at the bottom of the volcano near the sea, but I was on the top, and it was snowing!” Welch filmed the entire film in the famous fur bikini, which went on to be classed as the “definitive look of the '60s” during the winter, getting tonsillitis that got worse and worse as shooting progressed.

"I had so much penicillin in my body that I almost died," she told Fox News. But every cloud has a silver lining as, despite having a hard time filming it, the film gave the actress worldwide fame. Although, she herself said, "the only thing I really did in that movie was run in that bikini!"

She leaves behind a son, Damon Welch, and a daughter, Latanne "Tahnee" Welch, who is also an actress.