New Netflix Crime Drama is a Gory Barcelona Travelogue
“City of Shadows” takes viewers on a bloody tour of many of the city’s best-known sites.
In the opening scenes of “City of Shadows,” a man is hung from the roof of Gaudí’s famed Casa Milà, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and burned alive. Viewers who stick around will be treated to visual tours of several other Gaudí sites and old Barcelona’s neighborhoods, some with a burning body and others without.
For fans of Barcelona, “City of Shadows” embraces the city like few productions, taking full advantage of the city’s charms and mysteries. Almost every scene finds a new eye-catching Barcelona locale to spotlight, to the point it can seem like a tourism bureau video, except, of course, for the burning bodies.
Overall, the series — Netflix’s latest efforts to mine the Spanish market — is a cliché crime procedural, following two stern-faced detectives, each wrestling with their own demons, as they track a serial killer(s) — spoiler alert! — who is dubbed, the “Shadow of Gaudí.” But it is a fun watch simply to see the actors moodily striding through Barcelona’s streets and best-known tourist attractions, even if it has little to do with the plot. (The series turns the city into “a central character within the story,” promotional materials promise.)
Beyond using the tourist sites as a backdrop, the script dives a teeny bit deeper into the city’s psyche, dropping references to the shifting forces that shape Barcelona. There are mentions of separatists and the bourgeois, and the old families that ruled Barcelona for decades. One ill-fated women is fighting expropriation of her home near Parc Güell. Archival footage is used in every episode to flash back to the Barcelona of the late 20th Century, a depressed city slowly coming back to life, with many of the old neighborhoods demolished in the name of progress.
But the real star here is Gaudí and his legacy of inspiring and mysterious buildings. Each episode is framed around a Gaudí project, with narration providing helpful background on each site, making “City of Shadows” the rare crime show that seems a little educational.
Gaudí fans can decide for themselves if they like the idea of their hero’s creations used as the setting for a series of horrific murders, but there’s no doubt his gloomy creations serve as fun locations for a murder romp. And the producers received broad access to the sites, providing glimpses into areas that many tourists can’t (or don’t bother) to explore.
The show takes you inside several less-traveled Gaudí buildings, including Palau Güell, the mansion off La Rambla that Gaudí designed as the home for his chief benefactor, Eusebio Güell. There are also lengthy scenes at Colonia Güell, a stalled attempt to create a modernist industrial community for Güell’s textile operation, about 25 miles from Barcelona. The detectives spend a night in the Gaudí Crypt, the foundation of a massive unfinished church in Colonia Güell that was a testing ground for many of the ideas Gaudí would use in Sagrada Familia.
Beyond Gaudí, the producers work hard to incorporate different elements of Barcelona into the story. The lead detective, perennially troubled Milo Malart (Isak Férriz), lives in a crummy dive in Barceloneta and unwinds with swims in the Mediterranean. An interview takes place at Casa Vicens, Gaudí’s first residential design, which opened to the public in 2017. Several scenes are shot on Montjuïc; a witness is chased through Vila Olímpica, the waterfront neighborhood created for the 1992 Olympics.
Disenfranchisement and the destruction of working-class Barcelona neighborhoods is ultimately one of the show’s central themes, which is not something that comes up in many network-TV-level, serial killer-chasing crime dramas.
“None of this existed before the Olympics,” Malart moodily tells his partner as they drive along the waterfront. “It was a full-on cleanup operation.”
The series is not exactly a love letter to Barcelona — see: repeated burning bodies — but it still manages to capture elements that unmentioned in the tourist books. Horrible things happen in the Barcelona of “City of Shadows,” a city once ruled by evil men, and that’s something you don’t learn from YouTube vlogs.