Click a point to jump to its film.
For three days in May 2019 you could not walk into the old town of Besalú. HBO was dressing it as an Italian village, early twentieth century, for the third season of Westworld: sand laid over the squares, pipes and plaques boxed in, shutters across modern windows, Carrer Major relabelled Via Principale and the town hall relabelled Taverna delle Farfalle. The shops inside the closure shut under a compensation agreement. Residents were walked through the set by production staff when they needed to post a letter. A casting session in Girona looked for a hundred Nordic-looking extras to play German soldiers or police.
Eight cards in the Catalan film office's filmography name Besalú, and none of them names a street. That includes ours: Perfume shot here in 2005 and the card says only that the production was in the town.
The rest of the eight run Azaña, shot in 2007, the thriller series Cucut, the Hindi romantic comedy Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar, the Barcelona stretch of the sixth season of Cobra Kai, Land of Women and The Map That Leads To You. Add a twelve-person student crew from a Barcelona film school, who shot a short here in March 2026 in the Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer park and in a neighbour's flat.
Besalú became a county in its own right in the tenth century and stayed one until 1111, and between 1017 and 1020 it had a bishop of its own as well. What is protected here is the whole old town rather than any one building in it. The bridge everyone photographs is a reconstruction of 1965: the architect Francesc Pons i Sorolla put it back working from engravings Jean-Charles Langlois made early in the nineteenth century and from a wall painting inside one of the houses in the town.
On 30 and 31 July 2026 the bridge and the near end of Carrer del Pont Vell were closed on and off again, this time for a Disney feature. The town's tourist train ran as a free shuttle from the car park. The tourism councillor, Germán Mas, says it brought as many as five hundred people to the town, and that this was the shoot that finally gave the council enough for a guided route around the places where filming has happened.