those summers.
“Travel through scenery, music and sensations”. That was the goal of Fernando G. Molina, creator and director of Paradise (premiere on Movistar + on June 4). Travel to the 90s. But to the summers of the 90s. Endless summers spent in a haze of fun and happiness between the songs of Mecano and OBK and the chapters of V at 8 in the afternoon.
Molina (the trilogy The Invisible Guardian, Palm Trees in the Snow) and his co-writers had several ideas in mind: to create an event series, the kind that brought us together in front of the TV every day or week; travel to 1992, when they were in full adolescence; replicate the eternal summers of those young years and scratch in the Spanish imaginary of the event of that time, "the disappearances, the crimes, Spanish black popular culture for, instead of making a thriller, give it a fantastic focus.” Paradise is all that.
Mediterranean skies.
It starts with the disappearance of two girls in the fictional town of Almanzora de la Vega . One of them is the sister of one of the protagonists, Javi. He and his two great friends begin to take the search on his own and in the first chapter there is already a turn of events.
Paraíso is the name of the town's nightclub. That nightclub that will be one of the main stages. Like the lighthouse. Like the beaches. The cliffs. Like the town itself, its streets and that square with the recreational ones. A town that could be many towns on the Levante coast. And that, in fact, is a composition of many peoples.
“When you read the script, the story takes place in a town that doesn't exist, because Levante has changed so much in recent years. It was about imagining it and trying to look for it. The town is many towns and many places”, he says. Anton Laguna, Paradise art director. He and Molina undertook several trips along the Valencian coast "for two or three months", gathering the pieces that would form the puzzle that is Almanzora de la Vega.
The port of Altea.
“The town that we have invented is an amalgamation of the entire Mediterranean coast, starting with Castellón and almost reaching Murcia”, Molina continues. “We had to reproduce the 90s and the coast is very damaged, we had to take a square from here, a street from there and then a lot of intervention of art and digital effects to make it look like we are in the year 92”.
Almost twenty different locations build Almanzora de la Vega, but they took as base of operations and map, Altea. "Although it has been transformed a lot, it does preserve a part that has not been touched, it has a small port and it has a road that goes to the beach and that overlooks a bay," says Laguna. “In Altea we had the main geography that fulfilled the key elements of the story.”
Those wonderful 90's.
However, the main street and square were shot in The Perello. The promenade is also that of El Perelló. In Olive they found another one of the streets. In benidorm They located the road that goes from the town to the disco “because it had texture, without signs”. They added the discotheque with digital effects, they shot the interiors in Valencia and the exterior was built "in a wasteland in Chinchon”. The lighthouse is the Cabo de la Nao. Quino's restaurant is filmed in Santa Pola. "It was hard for us to find a traditional paella place," adds Antón Laguna. The spa is a mix in itself: the exterior is a spa of Alhama de Aragon, the basement, they placed it in Madrid; the interior in Segovia. And the dam is almost in Basin.
The magic of television to achieve that emotional and nostalgic trip they were looking for with Paradise. "We were very determined to rebuild what summers were like, the coastal towns, what relationships between people were like, between friends, which has changed a lot," says Molina, who admits to having reflected on the protagonist and a little on the obsession with Mechano's sister. “Things have been won and lost along the way. The snack of Nocilla sandwich, the bike, put you to see V at 8 in the afternoon. There are many things that reproduce those sensations. Have the whole summer ahead when the course is over. And I think that for people my age a little more or less, it will transport them to that moment.
A puzzle of locations.
'STRANGER THINGS' OR 'BLUE SUMMER'?
Comparisons can be obnoxious, but Molina doesn't mind the obvious and overly fast-paced ones with Stranger Things. “It is not a bad comparison either, it is a series that has fascinated me, it has been a phenomenon all over the world. But argumentatively they don't look alike, apart from the fact that they are teenagers and one rides a bike, but that was also Verano azul. In fact, it looks more like Summer Blue”, she says.
Afternoons at the arcades.
And perhaps that is why it was very clear to him that Almanzora, the town of Paraíso, had to be very Spanish because of the landscape and that Mediterranean light that it also has the warmth of nostalgia and memories. "So that it would not look like other series, that it would have its touch of identity," she says. “And then the Levante theme of the 90s that resonates with mysteries, although it is not a thriller, we play with the viewer… Who has taken those three girls? where are they? To later discover that everything we explain to them It has nothing to do with the real world.”
In the Levantine 'paradise'.