A side of Barcelona you may have already seen - on the big screen

By Manuel Meyer Aug 17, 2010, 13:04 GMT

Barcelona - Pedro Almodovar, Daniel Bruehl, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Dustin Hoffmann, Scarlett Johannson and Woody Allen all have something in common: they filmed in Barcelona.

Now, city tours of the Spanish metropolis on the Mediterranean take visitors to the most popular settings - with a few anecdotes about the film shoots along the way.

'I heartily invite you today to a very special kind of city sightseeing tour,' tour guide Cristina Belenguer said.

'Directors often have a good eye for beautiful, interesting, but not always absolutely apparent things,' the 27-year-old Catalonian woman added. 'Therefore today we want to get to know Barcelona in a completely new way - based on the favourite film settings of the great directors.'

In Barcelona, all the important architectural styles that a film director could wish for are in evidence, ranging from the Romanesque and Gothic to post-modern, Belenguer noted. Up to 100 feature films, TV series and commercials are thus shot in Barcelona every year.

The starting point of the tour, the statue of Christopher Columbus, served as the first setting for director Pedro Almodovar in his film 'All About My Mother.'

The tour proceeds along the Passeig de Colom on foot to the nearby Placa del Duc de Medidnaceli, in the middle of which the Neptune fountain is bubbling away. The cozy square is surrounded by grand, but run-down, facades of buildings.

Belenguer pulled out some photographs of a scene from 'All About My Mother.'

'Do you remember this scene? It is here that Penelope Cruz, as a former nun, meets her father for the first time, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, as he is walking his dog across the square,' the tour guide said.

Belenguer led her group further on, through narrow old city alleys to the Placa de la Merce.

'Can you imagine how it must have smelled here when around two tons of stinking fish were spread all over the place?' she asked, noting that star director Tom Tykwer had done so while filming his cinema hit 'Perfume.'

Tykwer needed the fish in order to credibly portray the Place de la Merce as a stinking, Medieval-era market square, the birthplace of the olfactory genius - and later on, a murderer of women - Jean- Baptiste Grenouille.

If you look closely, you can recognize the church walls and see that some of the modern facades were covered over for the film to conceal their electrical cables.

Almost all of the city scenes in 'Perfume' were shot in Barcelona. Tykwer scarcely had to change any of the winding alleyways and arcaded lanes in order to replicate an 18th-century Paris setting.

Belenguer next led the group across the pretty Placa del Rei, which in the Middle Ages served as an arena for bullfights and witch- burnings, to a shop which people likely wouldn't find on their own. The Herbosteria del Rey, the city's oldest health-food shop, was perfume maker Baldini's store in 'Perfume.'

Moving on via the Carrer de Ferran and the Carrer del Bisbe, the group proceeded to the Placa de Sant Felip Neri. It is the same route that Grenouille took in his search for the 'mirabelle girl' before he murdered her. From photographs of the film scenes, everything at the location is recognizable.

Most Barcelona visitors are unaware of the square, but Woody Allen also treasured it as a setting. It was here that in his comedy 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona,' Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johannson drank a cafe con leche on the terrace of a cafe located on the square.

Not far away, there is the tradition-steeped bar 'Quatre Gats,' where Allen had Javier Bardem meet up with Scarlett Johannson for the first time. The 'Quatre Gats' has a special radiance. It was here that for decades Barcelona's artists, poets and intellectuals would meet. Pablo Picasso was also a regular customer and he personally tacked his early paintings on the walls.

But Barcelona is naturally more than just the old Gothic city district of Barro Gotico.

Film directors Allen and Almodovar valued the fantastic architectural artworks of Antonio Gaudi, such as his Casa Mila, the Sagrada Familia church - which is the city's trademark structure - and the Parc Cuell as film shoot locations.

Tykwer used the museum village of Poble Espanyol, atop the city's Montjuic peak, for his grand final scene in 'Perfume' - the execution of the murderer, which turns into an event of mass ecstasy.

'Many film locations were already known to us,' said two members of the tour group, Neus Callis and Xavier Planas. 'But we did not know the interesting anecdotes related to the film.'

'And other buildings and streets, we hadn't seen or at least hadn't been aware of how beautiful they actually are - even though we are actually from Barcelona,' he added.