In 2025, the Berlinale designated Spain as “Country in Focus” at its European Film Market, the industry’s leading professional marketplace. The recognition is as much industrial as symbolic: Madrid has built an export-driven audiovisual industry that few European capitals can match today.
Spain’s spotlight at the Berlinale’s professional market confirmed the ground gained by Spanish productions across the European value chain. Germany’s 2025 coalition agreement reflects the same ambition: making Germany more attractive as a filming destination and better structuring its audiovisual industry for export. Both economies are pointing in the same direction but Madrid simply offers a fully operational production and experimentation base to get there.
La Casa de Papel reached 34.4 million households in the month following its third season release. In Germany, the series topped Parrot Analytics’ rankings in December 2021, with a demand level 32 times above the market average. Élite and then Berlin extended the reach of Madrid’s productions across European and German-speaking audiences. Most tellingly, data from ICEX and Parrot Analytics presented at MIPCOM 2025 showed that 26.1% of Spanish titles rank in the top 20% of non-English-language content generating the most streaming revenues internationally, a ratio unmatched anywhere in Europe.
Set-jetting: when fiction becomes an economic driver
The term refers to the practice of travelling to the filming locations of favourite series and films. In Madrid, the phenomenon has been quantified: according to a study by the Madrid Film Office and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, relayed by Euronews, audiovisual productions shot in the capital generated €1.54 billion in economic impact between 2021 and 2024, averaging €385.5 million per year. Over that period, the city hosted 173 films and 242 series. In 2025, international tourist spending in Madrid reached €17.896 billion, up 11% year-on-year and 71% compared to 2019.
A shift in scale
Employment in Spain’s audiovisual sector grew by 93% in three years, from 32,000 professionals in 2020 to over 62,000 by end of 2023. The country has become Europe’s second-largest film producer, while the OTT market reached €3.4 billion. In June 2025, Netflix announced more than €1 billion in investment in Spain between 2025 and 2028, from its hub in Tres Cantos, near Madrid presented as its largest filming infrastructure in the European Union.
Madrid vs Berlin
Berlin remains a major creative industries hub, with 265,000 jobs, €44 billion in revenues and more than 5,000 companies in film and television. But this strength is built primarily on a large domestic market and a production logic largely oriented towards German-speaking audiences. Madrid offers a different profile: smaller in volume, but more directly geared towards export and the international circulation of content. For German companies in audiovisual, animation, post-production or video games, that gap is a business decision.
The Madrid Film Office supported 62 international productions in 2024 – studios, post-production companies, digital content publishers… – throughout their setup and filming processes. The Community of Madrid invests directly: according to Euronews, it granted a €1.5 million subsidy to Woody Allen to shoot his next film in the capital in 2026-2027. Competitive tax incentives complete the picture. For German players in the creative industries, Madrid is no longer a backdrop or a tax destination, it is a production base connected to European and Hispanic markets.