The production designer asked Barcelona for a week to turn one street of the Gothic Quarter into eighteenth-century Paris. The city said no: tourists. What it offered instead was a single night, in on Saturday evening, shoot at first light on Sunday, strike immediately, and by Monday morning nothing left to show it had happened. Uli Hanisch says he heard himself agree to that, and that at around half past five in the morning he thought the crew would fall over.
14
places on the route
Four of the places stand inside 600 m of the Gothic Quarter; the rest run north to the French border — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
He does not say which street it was. What the night bought is most of the film's first hour, a Paris the production had decided not to shoot in Paris: Croatia, France and the Czech Republic were all looked at over more than a year, and the distributor's production notes say the real Paris and the real Grasse were dropped because they sat too far apart for a unit that needed to move fast. So Paris became the Barri Gòtic, Grasse became the old quarter of Girona plus a few pieces of Barcelona, and the tannery, the city gates, the prison cell and the mountain cave were all put inside one fortress at Figueres, ninety minutes north of the city. France got into the film exactly once, and nobody wrote down where: a three-day unit went to Provence at the end of June 2005 for the lavender fields.
The one room the story turns on never left Germany. Baldini's workshop was built on the largest stage at Bavaria Studios in Munich, where shooting started on 12 July 2005 and stayed for fifteen days. Dustin Hoffman worked there and, the production told reporters in Barcelona that August, nowhere else. He never came to Spain.
The Paris market
Carrer de Ferran
Carrer de Ferran, Barcelona, looking east from La Rambla on an ordinary afternoon.
Photo: Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ). · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Grenouille is born at a fish stall in the Paris market on the hottest day of the year, and his mother tries to hide him under the gutting table among the entrails. The market is the first thing the film has to sell. At a press conference in Barcelona in August 2005, with the shoot still running, Tykwer named the street it was built on: Carrer de Ferran, worked over hard enough to strip its good looks off it and leave somewhere dirty, stinking and packed with extras. The Catalan government's heritage portal names the same street. So does the city's own visitor site.
Ferran runs about 350 metres straight from La Rambla to Plaça de Sant Jaume, cast-iron lamp standards down both sides, and it is one of the busiest walking routes in the old city, which is the whole reason a film crew gets a night rather than a week. The production dirtied entire stretches of road and could film on them only between eight and noon; the Dirt Unit that laid the filth had to lift it again the same day. Extras were in the chair at one in the morning, because wigs, teeth and skin took more than six hours a head. Some of them were tradespeople doing on camera what they did for a living, fishmongers among them; the rest had been taught the trade they were playing.
The square nobody names
Plaça de la Mercè
The Neptune fountain end of Placa de la Merce, with the former Credit Mercantil building behind.
Two and a half tons of fish and one ton of meat went down on the paving of a restored Barcelona square, the production notes say, and the smell carried for miles. Tykwer looked back on those days fondly. The notes call the place a beautifully restored city square and never say which one, and no other account of the shoot fills the gap. A market sequence can run along a street and open onto a square, so his own naming of Carrer de Ferran does not settle it either.
Two squares have their names on the record. The city's visitor site says the film transformed Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, Plaça de la Mercè, Carrer de Ferran and the Poble Espanyol into period France, and attaches no scene to any of the four. A 2025 piece in the Barcelona press puts the markets on La Mercè and the streets around it, and cites nothing at all.
La Mercè is the flatter and emptier of the two: a wide open square two minutes from the harbour front, the baroque façade of the basilica on one side, nineteenth-century ashlar across from it, a Neptune fountain and benches at the far end.
The other one is the opposite kind of space, enclosed and quiet, reached by two narrow lanes off Carrer del Bisbe, with a school along one side, an octagonal fountain in the middle and two big plane trees over it. The stone at the foot of the church is chewed and cratered: shrapnel from an air raid on this square in January 1938.
The film commission's directory lists the square among this film's locations and the city lists it among the sites transformed. Neither says what was shot here. Walking-tour blogs put the murder of the plum girl in this square, on the strength of the fountain being in the shot; none of them names a source, and no production document mentions the place at all.
Grimal's tannery, where the boy is sold and worked half to death. The gates of Paris. The cell where Grenouille is held after his arrest, which is the fortress's own prison doing the job it was built for. And the cave in the Massif Central where he lies in the dark and works out that he has no smell of his own, which the notes place in Figueres without saying where in Figueres. Fifteen days of the schedule were spent here. Frank Griebe, the cinematographer, put it plainly: Girona for the scruffy city streets, Figueres as the back lot for the tannery, the dungeon and whatever else came up.
The fortress is the same age as the story. Work began in 1753, on a bastioned plan, and the result is claimed as the largest in Europe: a perimeter of about 3.1 km measured along the covered way, walls 15 m thick, a dry moat of some ten hectares, eighty-nine casemates, eight cisterns. The last session of the Spanish Republican Cortes was held inside it in February 1939, and the army kept it as a military prison afterwards. A public consortium runs it now and it takes visitors.
Grasse is Girona
Pujada de Sant Domènec and the steps to Sant Martí
Pujada de Sant Domenec, Girona: the stepped street of the Barri Vell seen from the top.
For six days in September 2005 the Barri Vell of Girona was Grasse. Traffic was cut from the 19th to the 24th, and the town came apart before it could be dressed: road signs, street lighting, drainage channels and street furniture all lifted out. Façades were made up with earth and other organic matter, to be washed off afterwards; anything that could not be hidden was wrapped in latex. About two hundred people from the town were taken on as extras, and they dressed and had their faces done in the Sant Domènec theatre.
No production source names a single Girona street. The provincial tourist board names two, this stairway and the Jardins de la Francesa, and Time Out Girona puts a scene on the flight that climbs to the church of Sant Martí Sacosta: Grenouille taking the red-haired prostitute. That the old quarter played Grasse was reported before it happened and confirmed by Tykwer afterwards. That it was these steps rests on the tourist board and a listings magazine.
Two stairways meet here, twenty metres apart, one climbing to the old Dominican convent that gives the street its name, the other to Sant Martí. The arch of the Casa Agullana crosses the lower flight, and there are café tables at the bottom. Time Out's own film list for the city puts Arya Stark's escape, in the sixth season of Game of Thrones, on these steps, and says David Trueba shot Soldiers of Salamina in 2003 from inside the café. On the cathedral stairway a minute away it puts Jaime Lannister on horseback; the Ecuadorean paper Diario Expreso reported Disney's live-action Tangled filming there in July 2026.
Jardins de la Francesa
Jardins de la Francesa, Girona, under the apse of the cathedral.
The same tourist board list names this garden, and no production source mentions it. What the notes do add, without an address, is that Girona provided the house and workshop of Madame Arnulfi, where Grenouille learns enfleurage, the extraction of essential oil from flowers. Whether that house stands by this garden, or somewhere else in the walled town, is not written down anywhere.
The garden is a strip of terraces and box hedge inside the medieval wall, directly under the east end of the cathedral, on the walk that runs along the ramparts.
Alan Rickman described the house his character Richis lived in as a derelict place in the middle of Barcelona where the crew shifted a foot of rubbish off the floors and found marble underneath, painted the walls, moved in antique furniture, and got a terrace for the birthday scene and a maze for his daughter to get lost in. He gives no address, and neither do the notes, which say only that the villa, the cathedral of Grasse and Pelissier's perfume shop were all somewhere in the city.
This park has a maze, cut in cypress, and a balustraded double stair up the hillside. The film commission's directory lists it among the film's locations and the Catalan Wikipedia says a scene was shot here, in a sentence with no footnote and the wrong year on it. Nobody joins that up with Rickman, and marble floors under a foot of rubbish do not sound like a garden, so the interiors are probably another building somewhere in Barcelona that nobody has named.
The garden was laid out from 1791 in neoclassical taste and extended later in romantic taste; it is municipal and ticketed, with free days on Wednesdays and Sundays. The commission's card for it carries a warning in capitals: no filming here at weekends or on public holidays.
Pelissier's shop, where Grenouille first smells scent out of a bottle, has no address in any production document. Barcelona press in 2025 says the interior was the Herboristeria del Rei, a nineteenth-century herbalist's shop on Carrer del Vidre off La Rambla, and gives nothing to back it.
Listed, with no scene attached
Castell de Requesens
The Castell de Requesens on its wooded hill in the Albera range.
The Catalan Wikipedia says several scenes were filmed at the castle, in an unfootnoted sentence, and the film commission lists it among the locations. Neither says which scenes. The production notes mention mountain and forest scenes shot in the country around Girona, which would suit this ground, and no source joins the two statements together.
The castle is documented from 859 and sits on a wooded summit in the Albera range, seven kilometres up a forest track from the hamlet of Requesens. What stands there now is largely a nineteenth-century rebuild in neo-Romanesque taste for the Counts of Perelada. The same Catalan article records another shoot here, Fernando Colomo's El caballero del dragón in 1985.
Canònica de Santa Maria de Vilabertran
The east side of the canonry of Santa Maria de Vilabertran.
An Augustinian canonry consecrated in 1100, with its church, bell tower, cloister and abbot's palace still standing together. The film commission's card for the monument says scenes from the film were shot here and says no more than that. The Catalan heritage agency runs it: ticketed, with a short list of free days that includes the last Tuesday of July and of August.
A convent of 1583 on the cliff at Punta de Santa Anna, above the sea, now a private events venue with more than five thousand square metres of garden. Its entry in the film commission's directory, written by the venue itself, says the film shot partly here and dates it to 2004. Principal photography ran from 12 July to 16 October 2005. The same card records Kenny Ortega ending Cheetah Girls 2 with a wedding on the site.
The Greek and Roman city on the shore at L'Escala, run as a site of the Catalan archaeology museum. It is on the film commission's list of places this film shot in. What was filmed there, and where on the site, is not something any source says.
Also from that list, with no scene attached. Besalú is a town of about 2,400 people in La Garrotxa, and the thing people come for is the eleventh-century fortified bridge over the Fluvià. Whether a camera was ever pointed at the bridge is a guess, and the coordinate on the map above is the town, not a spot in it.
The film commission's directory puts the production in the old harbour without naming a quay, and no second source mentions it. Port Vell was rebuilt for the 1992 Olympics with a marina, an aquarium and a shopping deck on the water; nothing of the eighteenth-century port stands above the surface.
Grenouille is brought out to be killed in front of a town that has come to watch, and the town does something else instead. A whole week went on that one sequence. Tykwer had admired the Barcelona theatre company La Fura dels Baus for years, rang them up on the spot when the problem of the crowd came up, and they drilled it. How big the crowd was is not settled: the counts given at the time and since differ by a factor of six.
The square is the Plaça Major of the Poble Espanyol, on the flank of Montjuïc, and it is not old. The place was built for the 1929 International Exposition as a walk-through anthology of Spanish village architecture, streets and squares and all, with the arcades on the north side of this square copied from Sangüesa. The one location in Catalonia where the production got a week instead of a night was the one that had been a set from the day it opened.
The Gothic Quarter had its street back by Monday morning, which was the deal. The Plaça Major is still there, through the gate and past the arcades, and it has never belonged to a town.
