Two storey houses faced in ceramic tile line a straight grid to the beach, where the thriller El silencio del pantano filmed inside a house on Carrer de Millars.
What El Cabanyal looks like
El Cabanyal sits on a straight grid of streets that runs from the old fishing port to the beach, with no curve in any of them. Most blocks hold two storey houses over a ground floor shop or workshop, built close together with almost no gap between one and the next.
The houses date mostly from after an 1875 fire, with many individual dates worked into the facades reading 1917 to 1928. Walls are painted white, blue or pale green. Ceramic tile borders in zigzag, scale and rose patterns run around the doors and windows. The roofline sits behind a parapet rather than showing its tiles to the street.
and run the length of the grid and carry its shops, while shorter streets such as cross them on the way to the sand. The is a 1958 building on Carrer de Martí Grajales. It runs an open air stretch of stalls, the Tira de Contar, from Thursday to Saturday.
The tile work varies from one house to the next rather than repeating a single pattern. is a 1917 house at 262 Carrer del Progrés. Its front has four tiled pot mosaics and three neo-Gothic gargoyles as water spouts, more ornamented than the plain tile borders on most of the block.
Shot in El Cabanyal
The 2019 thriller El silencio del pantano filmed inside a house on Carrer de Millars, one of the short streets that cross the grid toward the beach. The regional president visited the set during the shoot.
El silencio del pantano, 2019
A house on Carrer de Millars
The production filmed a scene inside a house on this street, confirmed by the regional government's own account of visiting the shoot. No source published which house it was or gave it a street number. Street View
What El Cabanyal can double for
Madragoa in Lisbon, Portugal
Madragoa is Lisbon's old riverside fishing quarter. Its houses are tiled to keep damp off the walls, the same reason Cabanyal's are. They stand two and three storeys over lanes that climb from the river. The streets climb and bend rather than running straight, so a handheld or long lens shot holds the match better than a wide static one. Madragoa's tiles run mostly in solid blues rather than Cabanyal's geometric rose and zigzag borders, so a close shot of a facade would give it away. Try searching tiled riverside fishing houses now.
Barceloneta in Barcelona, Catalonia
Barceloneta was built as a grid of narrow fishermen's row houses running down to the sea, on the same small scale as Cabanyal. Its earliest houses stood two storeys, until an 1837 change let owners rebuild up to four and six storeys across most of the grid. A few of the original low corners still stand for a tight street level frame, but Barceloneta's walls carry none of Cabanyal's tile work. Try searching two storey fishermen's row houses now.
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