Silence, it rolls

It is well known that the main festival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the Carnival, weeks of debauchery in which the participants of the party dress up to have fun and pretend for a while to be someone they are not.

But did you know that the city itself also dresses up? The miracle is achieved by the film industry which, with the attraction of advantageous tax conditions, has found in the islands the perfect set for its shootings. It is impossible to list all the films and series that have been shot here, but the productions are so frequent that it is common to find a star, national or international, in Santa Cruz. To name a recent one, a joke was circulated about Gerard Butler having to be registered as a census taker because he was filming on these streets for so long. He even had time to watch CD Tenerife play.

Gerad Butler is one of those who has disguised Santa Cruz, the United States in his case, turning the quiet streets, or beaches, of Santa Cruz into a place where robberies and shootouts ‘made in Hollywood’ take place. They say that it is Cadiz that resembles Havana, but the neighborhood of El Toscal has also been the Cuban capital, in the series of the Cuban -so he will know well the resemblance- Wiliam Levy. Disguises of America, but also disguises of Europe: Santa Cruz is Athens in one of the films of the Bourne saga, a time when it was Matt Damon – with his Spanish from Argentina – who was a neighbor. And famous is the chase up the steep stairs of the Valleseco neighborhood.

These are just examples that show the strength of the film industry in the Canary Islands, but they are examples in the city. The seventh art has also been fixed in Anaga, which offers a number of landscapes capable of imitating many places in the world with the convenience of being within walking distance. Because Anaga has been the jungle of the Amazon, in ‘Oro’, but also the Guinean jungle in the series ‘Dos Vidas’, or even the door to another world in the series ‘Der Greif’.

And that is cinema, but now that you know it, take a good look at catalogs or fashion photos, advertisements or programs… If you have your eyes wide open you will see many corners of Anaga, even if they say it is another part of the world, eyes as open as those of the producers who realized the possibilities offered by ‘disguising’ the municipality of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.