When the location of a series becomes the next destination

Where are you going on a trip and what series are you watching are two of the questions we ask the most.

The second was never made to Vincent van Gogh;

The first would have liked to answer that it was Japan, a country where some local artists made very popular xylographs in the 19th century and which were called

.

Prints that the Dutch painter and other impressionists of the time were in love with because of their light, the landscapes and the technique with which they were made.

by Utagawa Hiroshige, became a source of inspiration in the West and a prescriber of travel.

Movies and series have not done anything that painting and literature did not do first.

Before the screens invaded our lives, the readers of Benito Pérez Galdós, James Joyce, Frank Kafka and Fernando Pessoa walked and walk through their books the streets of Madrid, Dublin, Prague and Lisbon, respectively.

Cities that endowed with eloquence.

These types of trips today are inspired by the productions of HBO, Movistar Plus+, Netflix and other audiovisual platforms.

Still from the Spanish series 'La casa de papel', created by Álex Pina.

Through his series and movies, viewers discover unknown realities of familiar places, as well as places they knew almost nothing about.

The Baltimore of

, the New Orleans of

, the Edinburgh of

, the Bath of

, the Birmingham of

, the island of El Hierro in the series of the same name, the Doñana marshes in

, Japanese anime, Turkish and Colombian soap operas, South Korean movies and Nordic

turn viewers into potential tourists by making them curious about the places where these productions have been filmed.

More information

This is the first 'Game of Thrones' theme park in Northern Ireland

The synergy that occurs between the series, films and their locations benefits tourism.

In this way, there are destinations that add one more reason to be visited and others that are positioned in the tourist circuit thanks to their appearance on the screen.

That is to say, that a foreign viewer sees Spanish content and recorded in Spain, such as

, increases his interest in culture and the desire to want to visit the country.

"These productions put cities, towns and places on the tourist map and represent a post-filming economic development of tourism beyond sun and sand," says Francisco José Pradana, professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication at the European University. .

A sequence from the filming of 'The Bridgertons', a series set in the city of Bath, in the southwest of England.

LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX (LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX)

Tourism on the rise, as evidenced by the fact that this edition of Fitur once again bets on Fitur Screen, the space co-organized by the Spain Film Commission and Ifema Madrid, with the collaboration of Netflix, aimed at film tourism and where the new leisure enclaves of the screen tourism and the influence of cinema and series on travel culture.

screen tourism

Blockbusters can be promotional campaigns for the locations of the destinations in which they have been filmed.

This phenomenon, known as screen tourism, predates the appearance of the aforementioned audiovisual platforms, when the film industry and tourism did not shake hands.

There have always been films that prompted one to travel: those of James Bond, in which agent 007 goes on a gourmet tour of the world;

and that of

, which caused the number of international tourist visas in Australia to skyrocket by 40% from 1984 to 1992, according to data from

, study of the World Tourism Organization in collaboration with Netflix.

Backpackers traveling through Thailand have never been lacking, nor are there any shortage of dream beaches.

Maya Bay, on the island of Phi Phi Leh, became a mass phenomenon for having been the location for the movie

.

So many people went to see it, some 5,000 people a day, that they had to close it for a while to save and repopulate the sand and its coral reefs.

With established screen tourism, new milestones followed.

trilogy

increased annual visits to New Zealand by 40% between 2000 and 2006, and between 2011 and 2013 the

saga increased the number of visitors to Great Britain sites by 230%. Brittany where the films were shot.

Birmingham is where the English series

An audience success that translated into a record number of national and international visitors in 2018 to the city: 42.8 million tourists, of whom 355,000 also visited the Black Country Open Air Museum in Dudley, its main

recording

. .

Between 2011 and 2019, the eight seasons of

, recorded in Northern Ireland, Croatia, Malta, Iceland and Spain.

In each of its locations, the number of visitors increased considerably, even after the completion of the fiction.

Becoming a filming destination requires a series of requirements that act as a magnet to attract large productions: good locations, professionals in the sector and tax incentives.

In Spain, where these requirements are met, the body that deals with all these issues is the Spain Film Commission and its 39 partners present in all the autonomous communities.

That is why it is not strange that Spain is a

Netflix

Behind these visits to the locations there is a work carried out by the tourist offices of the respective destinations, before and after the filming.

“When a relevant series or film is filmed in Ireland, such as

, we took the opportunity to make the connection with the destination”, says Soraya Gabriel, Public Relations executive of the Irish Tourist Office in Spain.

Which translates into the creation of urban and online thematic tours, an active promotion on social networks, recording of audiovisual pieces starring the actresses, actors, directors and screenwriters, both from the series and from the movies, in which they speak of them and their experience at the destination.

Ireland's promotional strategy with this series concluded in February 2022 with the inauguration of the Game of Thrones Studio Tour, an attraction located in the studios where some of its scenes were filmed in the town of Banbridge.

Cities turned into characters

Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in Tokyo during a sequence from the film 'Lost in Translation', directed in 2003 by Sofia Coppola.

Alamy Stock Photo

It is one thing to shoot a film or a series in a specific location for production reasons (economic and logistical) and another because said location is non-negotiable as it is one more character in the story.

, for a westerner, it doesn't make sense if it doesn't take place in Tokyo.

Those of Woody Allen films are not conceived outside of New York, with some beneficial exceptions.

The New York director portrays Manhattan and the upper class that inhabits it.

In the same way that Wong Kar-wai shoots in Hong Kong, a city-state that for the Chinese director is more an emotional state than a geographical place, and where he emigrated from Shanghai at the age of five with his mother.

Something similar happens with the films of Pedro Almodóvar, who shoots them in Madrid and towns in La Mancha to tell stories of women and minorities that make certain majorities uncomfortable.

Movies and series that make us want to travel to where they were filmed.

Trips that start from an emotion transmitted from a screen.

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