How Madrid became Spain's audiovisual capital.

If you mapped every major Spanish-language production company, streamer, and broadcast network onto a single overlay, the densest cluster on the map would not be Los Angeles, London, or Mexico City. It would be a roughly twenty-kilometer arc running from Madrid's northern districts up through the satellite town of Tres Cantos.

Inside that arc sit Netflix's first European production hub, Movistar Plus+, Mediapro Studio, Mediaset España's Mediterráneo content center, Atresmedia, Televisión Española, and Viacom International Studios. The Spanish public broadcaster is there. The major private networks are there. The streamers built their operational footprint there.¹

This article is about how that happened, what the cluster is producing now, and what the sourced numbers look like in 2025 and 2026.

The numbers, first.

The most concise summary of Madrid's audiovisual position comes from a study by AFI (Analistas Financieros Internacionales), presented at the 73rd San Sebastián Film Festival in September 2025:²

• The audiovisual sector contributes 2.6% of GDP and 2.8% of employment in the Community of Madrid — well above the national average.
• The sector generates €2.3 billion in direct GVA (gross value added) in the region, with a total economic impact above €7.2 billion.
• Madrid accounts for 28.9% of all active audiovisual companies in Spain, but produces 74.7% of the sector's revenue and 47.2% of its employment.
• More than 3,500 companies form the regional audiovisual ecosystem.

74.7% Share of Spain's audiovisual sector revenue generated by the Community of Madrid (AFI, 2025)

That last figure is the one to sit with. It means the rest of Spain — Barcelona, Valencia, the Basque Country, Andalusia, the Canary Islands — together accounts for roughly a quarter of the country's audiovisual revenue. The other three-quarters is in and around Madrid.

The Tres Cantos arc.

The geography is unusually concentrated for a major media center. Netflix's Madrid Production Hub — the streamer's first in Europe — opened in April 2019 inside the Secuoya Studios campus in Tres Cantos, a 22,000-square-meter facility about twenty minutes by car north of the city. It is the operational base for La Casa de Papel, Elite, and a slate of other Spanish-language originals.³

Five minutes from there are the offices of Movistar Plus+, the pay-TV and streaming unit of Telefónica, which has produced more than twenty original series since 2017. A quarter of an hour back toward the city center, in the Fuencarral district, are Mediapro Studio's offices. A short walk away is Mediterráneo, the content production and distribution arm of Mediaset España, the country's top-rated broadcaster.³

Viacom International Studios runs a Madrid office. Disney, Amazon, and HBO operate Spanish-language productions from the city.²

Madrid is home to the largest concentration of the audiovisual sector in Spain — this includes both independent cinema and major streamers. Movistar Plus+, Netflix, Disney, Amazon — all operate across Spain, but they do so from Madrid. The same goes for both public and private TV corporations like Mediaset, Atresmedia, and Televisión Española. — Carlo d'Ursi, VP, Madrid Audiovisual Cluster (San Sebastián Film Festival, 2025)

Why the cluster kept growing.

Three structural factors explain the concentration. None of them are accidents.

1. Tax incentives

Mainland Spain offers a 20% tax rebate for international film and television projects shot on Spanish soil. In May 2020, the deduction rate for both international rebates and domestic production tax credits rose from 25% to 30%, and the cap was raised from €3 million to roughly €14.4 million per project. The Canary Islands offer even higher rates, but for productions wanting a major European capital with a full crew base, the mainland — and specifically Madrid — is the practical center.⁴

2. The AVS Hub plan

In March 2021 the Spanish government launched the "Spain Audiovisual Hub of Europe" plan, a strategic framework with more than €1.6 billion of public investment scheduled through 2025. The plan covers film, television, animation, VFX, and video games. Roughly 83% of the budget is structured as low-interest loans from state bank ICO, additional ENISA loans, CESCE risk coverage, and bank guarantees from Crea SGR. The remainder funds training, regulatory reform, and direct production support.⁴

The plan also created a single-window facilitator entity — the Spain AVS Hub Bureau — in partnership with ICEX, the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade. The Bureau handles filming permits, tax incentive information, and internationalization support for production companies.

3. The local crew base

The Community of Madrid is home to roughly 35% of Spain's audiovisual production companies and approximately 31% of its animation and VFX companies. The City of Madrid itself invests over €6 million annually directly into the audiovisual sector, with more than €11 million invested over the current city administration through the General Coordination of the Mayor's Office alone.²

That spending supports a working ecosystem: trained crew, casting depth, post-production houses, equipment rental, location managers, and the institutional support of the Madrid Film Office and the regional Film Madrid agency.⁵

What is actually being shot.

The Madrid Film Office's 2025 annual report records a new record for the city: 71 feature films shot in the city of Madrid in 2025, alongside dozens of series and hundreds of advertisements.⁵

For comparison, the city hosted 41 feature films in both 2023 and 2024, 47 in 2022, and 53 series in 2024 (48 fiction plus 5 docuseries) according to the same source. The 2025 jump to 71 features represents the steepest year-on-year growth Madrid has recorded.⁵

In 2024, the city also hosted more than 430 medium- and high-impact advertisements. According to the Association of Advertising Film Producers (APCP), Madrid accounted for 42% of all advertising filming days in Spain in 2024, generating €212 million in advertising production investment retained in the city.⁵

Productions filmed in Madrid include

A non-exhaustive list of major productions that have used Madrid as either filming location or production base:

• La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) — produced from the Tres Cantos hub.
• Elite — Netflix Spanish-language original.
• Saturn Return (Segundo Premio) — three-time Goya Award winner, supported by Madrid City Council grants.
• Reina Roja — adaptation of the Juan Gómez Jurado novels.
• La novia gitana and La red purpura — Carmen Mola adaptations.
• International productions including Uncharted (directed by Ruben Fleischer) and others recreating cities from Berlin to Buenos Aires inside Madrid's varied locations.

The versatility point is worth underlining. As Raúl Torquemada, director of the Madrid Film Office, has noted, the city's location depth has been used to stand in for Berlin, Paris, Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Arizona within the same metropolitan footprint.⁶

The streaming pivot.

Several pieces of Madrid's recent growth are downstream of the global streaming wars. Netflix's Tres Cantos hub was the first European production facility the company built — meaning Madrid effectively became the operational center for Netflix's Spanish-language content strategy worldwide.

The implications extend beyond Netflix. Spanish has become the second-most prolific language in film and fiction series production globally, behind only English. In 2024, La Sociedad de la Nieve (Society of the Snow), directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, became the second-most-watched non-English-language film in Netflix's history, with approximately 94.4 million views. Nowhere, directed by Albert Pintó, took third place on the same chart.⁷

Both productions had significant Spain-based footprints. The streaming economics — high global reach for lower production costs than equivalent Hollywood projects — have continued to push investment into Spanish-language original content, and Madrid is where the bulk of that capacity sits.

Looking forward.

In September 2025 the Community of Madrid announced a new strategic plan for the audiovisual industry. The 2024 grant programs included a €2 million feature film production grant (extendable by another €2 million) and a €1 million promotion and distribution grant (also extendable). The Madrid Audiovisual Cluster, the City Council, and the regional Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Sport now coordinate jointly on industry promotion.²

The forward calendar includes the annual Iberseries & Platino Industria market — held in Madrid each October — which positions the city as the working bridge between European and Ibero-American audiovisual industries. The October 2025 edition included a dedicated AI Workshop featuring case studies in VFX, scripted workflows, sports content, and marketing applications.²

Implications.

For anyone evaluating Madrid as a media context, the audiovisual data is the most legible part of the case. Three quarters of Spanish-language audiovisual revenue. The first European Netflix production hub. The headquarters of Mediaset, Atresmedia, Movistar, and Spain's public broadcaster. A record 71 features shot in the city in 2025. A 20% national tax rebate for international productions. A €1.6 billion national hub plan running through 2025.

The .TV extension exists because of broadcast, video, and streaming. Madrid is the working capital of the third-most-spoken language in the world, and the country with the second-largest film and series production volume globally. The pairing of the two is unforced.

None of this is a sales pitch. It is what is on record. The Madrid Film Office reports, the AFI study, the Variety reporting on the Tres Cantos hub, and the WTTC and Cervantes data on Spanish-language reach are all publicly available and cited below.