What do the movies Perfume, Sahara, Melinda and Melinda and The Life of David Gale have in common? They’re all major Hollywood productions shot, at least in part, in Barcelona—which means big business for the city.

In 2004 alone, more than 20 full-length feature films were filmed in and around Barcelona, making the city one of the most popular filming locations in southern Europe. Many ads and television specials were also made here, boosting the total number of productions to 362 in 2004, a 33% increase over 2003. As a result, the audio-visual industry is booming. Filming and lighting crews, voice-over specialists, set designers and a host of other related industries have benefited from the boost in film-making.

International movie makers say they’re drawn to the city’s long sunny days, its varied landscapes and the colourful mix of architectural styles. In Barcelona, it’s possible to shoot a scene by the Mediterranean in the morning, in the gothic heart of the city at midday, and in the forest on the city outskirts in the afternoon.

“It might sound like a cliché, but the people of Barcelona can’t be the only ones to have realised the attractiveness of their home as a film set,” said director Ventura Pons, whose film City of Love was made here in 2004.

“I have now discovered that Barcelona is Havana, Marseilles and Naples all rolled into one,” said famed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.

As officials here are quick to note, Barcelona’s popularity as a movie set is excellent publicity for the city. Just as film fans want to go to New York to visit the places they’ve seen so often on screen, people are wanting to visit emblematic Barcelona sites such as Antonio Gaudí’s Parc Güell, the busy pedestrian boulevard Las Ramblas, or the central square Plaça Reial—all featured in recent films.

“The fact that Barcelona is featured in so many film productions encourages a lot of people to visit the city. Luckily, there are more and more images out there of Barcelona that are forming part of our collective memory, just as the images of Manhattan do,” Oriol Balaguer, head of Barcelona’s Cultural Institute, told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

Popular films with a strong focus on Barcelona include Cédric Klapicsh’s light-hearted French comedy Euro Pudding (2001, also called The Spanish Apartment), which features a group of Erasmus students in Barcelona, and Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-winning Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1998), about a woman from Madrid who goes to Barcelona in search of her dead son’s father, who turns out to be a transvestite with AIDS.